How to get started tracing your family history
Anne Shaughnessy, local history and genealogy librarian at the Mount Prospect Public Library, and her volunteer, Nancy Reese, offer the following tips for tracing your own family history and personal lineage:
• Start with yourself. Assemble all the family information you have at home and start filling in a family pedigree chart. They are available free online.
• Talk to your oldest living relatives as soon as possible and ask for stories and family information before they are gone.
• Have them immediately identify the people in old family photos before everyone forgets who is who and try to get information about where and when the photos were taken.
• Talk to your cousins. They may have heard stories or gleaned other information than you have.
• Once you have assembled all of the information that you can from relatives and know enough to be selective about information you uncover from public records, then put your name into a search engine and see what comes up. But remember to be selective. There will be many false leads. Many people have the same names so you need to know generally where and when they lived in order to get the correct information.
• Remember that libraries are your friends. Start with the one in your hometown and work outward, taking advantage of the free public information they offer before spending money on websites like ancestry.com.
• Join a genealogy group for networking and learning. The Northwest Suburban Genealogy Society meets the first Saturday of the month (except June, July, August and December) at Arlington Heights Senior Center, 1801 W. Central Road, Arlington Heights. Visit www.nwsgenealogy.org. The Computer Assisted Genealogy Group of Northern Illinois (CAGGNI) meets several Saturdays a month at the Schaumburg Township District Library, 130 S. Roselle Road, Schaumburg. Visit caggni.shuttlepod.org.
• DNA testing can be fun and interesting and might even connect you with distant relations, but the results really don't mean much without a paper trail. It could serve to prove what your research has indicated, however.
• Share your research and discoveries with family members far and wide so that it isn't lost if you have a house fire or something happens to you. Make plans in your will for who is going to get all of your research.
• Write a cohesive story about what you have learned and put it in the context of the times in which your ancestors lived. It is much more interesting, for instance, to know that a particular individual was living during the Irish Potato Famine or the Great Depression.