How to Research Your Family Tree :: Free Expository Process Essays

How to Research Your Family tree Do you ever wonder who your ancestors were? Do you ever wonder if you're related to anyone famous in history? I would guess that at some point you have pondered these questions. I know that I have. But how do you find out who your ancestors were and what they were like? Genealogy is the study of your ancestors and their descendants. In the last few years I havebecome very interested in genealogy and want to start researching my family history. With very limited experience in the field, where would I start? I figured that I could get at least some information from the Internet, so that is where I went. My home page on the Internet is through ALL so I started with its web page (www.aol.com). On the web page is a direct link to genealogy areas of ALL and links to other sites on the web. On ALL sites, Genealogy Community Center, you can search for surnames by home pages that are linked to ALL. Of course, you can just about imagine that with all the surnames out there this might be a difficulty task. It's not, if you know what you are looking for. Of all the web sites, I visited every one said work backwards from what you know to what you don't know. I started with the farthest point I could remember. I began by searching for the surname "Walker." There are thousand of links to "Walker" families, so I chose a few that looked promising. I went to http://voyager.dvc.edu/~bmckinney/www.sisna.com/users/ryoung/walker/wgaf22.html. This site has an extensive history on Walker families. Names, birth dates, and death dates are all part of the information that is provided. The hardest part of ge nealogy is matching names to names and birth dates to birth dates to get accurate information. If you locate that information, it can lead you to people you didn't know about. But the challenge is getting through the thousands of names that come up. I decided that I really needed to narrow my search so I tried a different web site that could help me. I went to Ancestry.com (http://voyager.dvc.edu/~bmckinney/www.ancestry.com). This web site offers searches of large databases such as the Social Security Death Index. The web site is not entirely free. You can use several of the databases to get information you may need but to use the large databases like birth records, death records, and obituaries you have to be a member of the web site.