Evening gents, was wondering if i could get your help.

My father recently dropped off a book of our families genealogy that he put together about 15 years ago. He sent countless letters and made numerous phone calls to people all over the world. This was before the days of internet. Through the relationships he made, he was able to trace our family roots back to the late 1700's.

My father in law was over the other night and this book, the one my father put together, had come up. Reason being is that we are expecting our second, a girl. We were wanting to keep with a family name. He was very interested and i could sense he wanted to know more about his family. Something to pass on to us and his 2 other daughters We know a good deal, but would like to dig deeper for him. Maybe surprise him for Christmas 2018 with his own book.

My question to you all is, where should i begin? What sources should I start with? Any guidance you have? Thanks for any help or guidance you can push me towards.

I apologize if i don't respond tonight.

As I have stated on some other threads, Ancestry.com has taken over the internet market in this regard , but is fraught with mistakes. And people don't even correct their trees when it is pointed out the types of mistakes that are there. If you use Ancestry.com, you must verify with documents and you should match records, make sure that dates and ages sound right, and so on.

We also began many years ago in the 1970s. Genealogy was way different then, as you know.My mom and my uncle did write letters , but they also went to courthouses and all through the South tracking down leads. Some lines come to a dead end, but others we tracked into the 1600s. Sometimes you find that courthouses have burned (often actually) and sometimes you go places where folks are stingy with records. Other times people are generous with information. Don't be surprised if you find both.

DNA - we are doing this the last few years, but this also has to be verified and some of the data that is returned is crap. What we have used it for is if somebody is tracking the same surname and we cannot make our lines connect, then DNA can help to show that we are or aren't the same line. For instance there are many McFarlands in Rutherford Co North Carolina. However, there are a much smaller number that are kin to us by DNA. So we found that there were two lines that were not connected much at all by the DNA.

Hope you have a good time doing this. We also have spent a good deal of time in cemeteries.

Ask a Mormon to help you, if you know any. Seriously, they are really into genealogy. And I think Ancestry.com is free for LDS members.

Van, thanks for your response. My father has always wanted to stop at old cemetery grounds when i was growing up. We would be on the way to a family friends deer lease and he would pull out the road atlas and see how many old cemeteries he could hit before we got there. I really never understood it till I got older. But now i find myself doing the same thing.

So if i understand, the websites are good to get a start. From there its up to me to make sure the puzzle pieces fit. My FIL's mother, bessie, passed away a few year ago at the age of 104. My FIL was the youngest. She shared many stories with me. I have tried to keep tract of those.

Don't forget simple Google. As was said with Ancestry, you have to find multiple sources (that are independent, not circularly reporting the same bad fact), to confirm.

I've been using genealogical research in my investigation of the 1813 Gutierrez-Magee Expedition. The regular historians had basically drawn a blank on who these guys did, as archival and primary source data was so limited. So I started doing basic internet research and found a lot of angles that you would never find otherwise.

Google brings in all sorts of sources, including the vast numbers of scanned books that Google has made available, which are text searchable. There was one guy in the Gutierrez-Magee Expedition named Darius Johnston. Some amateur researcher had guessed on a lark that he might be related to Albert Sydney Johnston, but others dismissed it because they had a supposed list of A.S.J. brothers and he wasn't on it. I delved deeper and discovered an old Johnston family history book written in the 1890s that was rare but had been scanned and digitized by Google. In it, I discovered that A.S.Johnston's father actually married 3 times and the "official" list of his brothers that someone was citing were only his full brothers. This guy who had fought in Texas in 1812-13 was actually Johnston's way older half brother. And then, with a few clues of things to search, I discovered a SECOND brother of A.S.J. who fought in Texas in 1813. I've never read a bio of A.S.J., but I don't think any one of these mentions the fact that when he was 7 years old, his two older brothers were fighting in a revolution in Texas. That's kind of important to the story of how A.S.J. decided to come to Texas.

A second story, which I've already related on another post, is how I cracked the code on who Augustus Magee (the leader of the Gutierrez-Magee Expedition was). His entire pre-expedition biography in the Handbook of Texas is one sentence with 4 factual points, 3 of which are wrong. I was able to break open a whole bunch of information after experimenting with various google searches. Knowing he went to West Point, I put in all sorts of search terms in with his name. Some with his full name, some with his first and last, some with just the word Magee. Finally, I put in "Augustus Magee" and "cadet" and 20 pages in on my search results, I came across a document that proved he had been a "cadet" at a preparatory school. That gave me a clue to who his family might be and I was able to blow open the door after that. Remember that one sentence in Handbook of Texas? I've now got 20 pages or new research on Magee sitting with an editor at the Southwestern Historical Quarterly awaiting review.

The point being that I did all of this through straight google searches. Take the name of your ancestor, or every potential misspelling of it, put it in quotes or reverse the first and middle names, etc. Toss in key words related to their profession or some town, or if you know the name of a ship, or whatever, put that in. Take any piece of evidence and explore it fully. Did he live in X town? Who were his neighbors. Frequently, when a family pulled up roots in North Carolina and moved to Texas, they didn't do it alone. I found another case where the same five families immigrated from the east to Kentucky, then Tennessee, then Texas. Turns out, they were all members of the same religious sect. They traveled together, they intermarried, they were essentially a little mobile community. If somebody drops off the research face of the earth, use clues like that to develop a plausible scenario to give you a shadow of their journey, then use that information to find them on the other side.

If they came from Germany or England or wherever, look into the region they were from. Don't know the region? Well, are they Catholic or Protestant? That might give you a clue. Which areas are Catholic or Protestant? Bear in mind, they might come from the opposite sect to what is common in that area, thus a protestant in Bavaria will be an oddity, or a Catholic in Northern Germany (my ancestors), so that might be a hint to why they left. If they raised a certain crop or ran a certain kind of business when they arrived in the U.S. then that's probably the same or similar job to what they had back in the old country.

Also, if you know a foreign language, or enough to pick out key words and phrases then drop text you think might be good into Google Translate, try going to the Google website for the country your ancestors came from. There is not just one google. Google.com will give you answers designed for Americans. Google.de or google.fr will give you German or French answers.

Say you think your ancestor was a farmer in Bavaria. Put his name in and use the German words "bauer" (farmer) and "Bayern" (Bavaria).

This type of searching can be very long and 90 percent of your searches will be fruitless. But when you find a great nugget of information, you will get an amazing thrill from it. And if your searches fail, don't give up on them. Keep a log. Come back to them. I've searched and found nothing and then a few months later, did the same search and something new came up due to a new document being scanned, a new blog post or just the algorithms "learning" from your search patterns in the intervening time.

The best part of it is that this type of research is free.

Oops. Can't edit my above post for errors for some reason. "Bauer" in German is builder. "Meyer" is farmer. Oh, and that's another point. Learn what your name means if you can. It might give a clue to profession. Professions were basically inheritable through the middle ages, really down to the 19th Century when you first started getting social mobility outside of England. Another possibility is that your name tells where they came from. In the above example, someone named Meyer was probably a farmer. Someone named Beyer was from Bavaria. I use German examples because I know German, but this sort of thing applies everywhere. If you have a strange name, take your country of origin and look up a translation. If you don't find something exact, look at similar words or homophones (if the name was Anglicized). If you're Italian or Spanish or French and you have de d' or du in your name, that means that's a place reference. Same thing for the O at the beginning of Irish names. For German names, if it ends in "er" or "burg" then it's referencing a town. If it ends in son, sen or sohn then it's the son of someone. Other languages have things like this.

The key is to be creative and think outside the box.

Seven Costanza said:

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Ask a Mormon to help you, if you know any. Seriously, they are really into genealogy. And I think Ancestry.com is free for LDS members.

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This is true. In our case we just used LDS library sources rather than an actual Mormon. We also used the DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution) some to rule in or rule out people.

I got started on this project for my own family just this year by signing up with Ancestry.com.

This

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Ancestry.com has taken over the internet market in this regard , but is fraught with mistakes

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cannot be over-stated. I found several instances where a child was born to parents who were not even teens at the time of the birth. I even found a couple of instances where a child was born to parents younger than the child. Or instances where a man could not have been the father because he died longer than the normal period of pregnancy, ie, 9 months.

I found myself frequently doing 'net searches (Bing or Google) to cross-verify information that just did not look right on Ancestry. With all of this, I was able to build an ancestry document that in three of my four grand-parents' branches, dated back to the 1300s. I often wonder how accurate any of this really can be, though. How can I really know that my family has a tangential relationship with President Andrew Jackson, or that even further back, my family heritage includes a King of Scotland who was killed at a siege against a Scottish castle during a period of civil war in England? Certainly makes for interesting reading and research but I've taken my findings of farther back than 3 generations with a grain of salt.

I am intrigued by the notion of finding more recent relatives that I have spread throughout the South by way of visiting cemeteries and perhaps county courthouses for records.

Good luck with your FIL's ancestry project.

Ancestry.com: Trust their data base. Do NOT trust the info in other member's trees without independent verification.

I've gone from knowing nothing about my maternal line to tracing them back to Prussia mid 1700s.

Also found things which should have been passed down in family lore but weren't; like a gggrandfather dying as a CSA pow in Camp Douglas IL.

And, some info I should hold private but will share; like Barak Obama and I have a common 10th great grandfather, a pilgrim named Thomas Blossom. Now, just WHY did I tell that!!!???

Something to keep in mind - even if you find documentation for your ancestors, there's always the possibility (even probability) that somebody fooled around on the side at some point.

Also, contact local historical societies from the areas which your family may have settled. A lot of the work concerning families which settled the area has already been done. For example, my family was one of the first into Bumcombe, County NC (Asheville) and the local historical society has a lot of information about them.

And don't forget the Mormons. Their Family Research Centers have direct access to their libraries in Salt Lake and you can get access to lot of records or hard to find genealogies there. A family member of mine published a genealogy back in the 80's and the only two places I could find it was in Salt Lake and some library in Iowa or Indiana that concentrated on genealogy. I was able to access the book from the FRC in Austin. Plus, the Mormons are really good at genealogy and don't mind giving you pointers or helping you out if they aren't busy.

There are also pretty good genealogy libraries in Houston and in the State library in Austin.

As for Buncombe County, that's where the term "bunk" came from. There was a representative from Buncombe County named Felix Walker who spoke at such great length that people came up with a term for it.

Felix Walker was a long hunter with Daniel Boone at a point. He was younger than Boone and Boone saved his life. Felix was wounded by Indians in an ambush and Boone I think hid him for a time so the Indians wouldn't kill him. Then Boone came back and fashioned a litter for him so he could be pulled back to safety .

Walker and his family were from Rutherford County. NC and his father signed the Tryon Resolves and fought with Washington. His father was named John Walker. This is him https://www.ncpedia.org/biography/walker-john

Start with your FIL. Ask his questions about his parents and grand parents. What was their name and where they were from. What was their birth dates. Just get him to talk about any stories that he remembers being told to him by his parents or grandparents if he knew them. That will help you narrow down where to start looking. Then you can get the county census records, marriage records and death records. If they came as immigrants in the 1800's or participated in the American Civil War will also help. My father did all of his research by hand written letters and by using libraries access to microfiche. When the internet became common, he still doesn't own a computer, any searches we do now days only confirms what he already knows and previously documented.

As for a Christmas present in 2018? Might want to rethink that timeline.

Rabid Cougar said:

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Start with your FIL. Ask his questions about his parents and grand parents. What was their name and where they were from. What was their birth dates. Just get him to talk about any stories that he remembers being told to him by his parents or grandparents if he knew them. That will help you narrow down where to start looking. Then you can get the county census records, marriage records and death records. If they came as immigrants in the 1800's or participated in the American Civil War will also help. My father did all of his research by hand written letters and by using libraries access to microfiche. When the internet became common, he still doesn't own a computer, any searches we do now days only confirms what he already knows and previously documented.

As for a Christmas present in 2018? Might want to rethink that timeline.

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This sounds like a good plan.

To make this interesting and long term, plan on going to places where your ancestors are from. Visit every one you're able to. Well, at least that's how I like to do it. I'm visiting Southwest Virginia this summer. I'm also going to South Carolina, but I'm down to general areas these days for South Carolina. It is difficult to tell precisely where many were buried or lived in the 1700s.

1) Start with FIL as suggested above. Do this on tape! Nowadays you can buy a USB recorded cheaply and then download the file. Not the iphone - Iphone audio is harder to manipulate. Folks will wander when you ask the questions. The audio record is invaluable. The very best.
2) get family photos - him, your spouse, etc. Ask him about the photos, on USB audio as described above. Make sure you can connect the photo to the audio (alpha numeric coding is great).
3) with the names and data from item 1, as suggested above, go find primary sources.
If you already are, by virtue of the genealogy materials for your side, a member of a lineal descent group (Sons of the Republic of Texas, Sons of American Revolution) - join and go to meetings. These folks can help build other trees.
Pull marriage licenses - will have to go to courthouse or public genealogy library (Dallas and Houston have good ones) Recent concept.
Pull marriage records - will have to go to courthouse/library
Pull census records when possible (hole because of fire at Census Office) - library
Pull military records - various sources.
Pull birth and death records where possible - library
Join Newspaper.com (an Ancestry company) and search for family references.
As noted above, don't trust the secondary sources and the purported work of others. Recognize that there will be phonetic differences amongst primary sources.

VanZandt92 said:

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Rabid Cougar said:

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Start with your FIL. Ask his questions about his parents and grand parents. What was their name and where they were from. What was their birth dates. Just get him to talk about any stories that he remembers being told to him by his parents or grandparents if he knew them. That will help you narrow down where to start looking. Then you can get the county census records, marriage records and death records. If they came as immigrants in the 1800's or participated in the American Civil War will also help. My father did all of his research by hand written letters and by using libraries access to microfiche. When the internet became common, he still doesn't own a computer, any searches we do now days only confirms what he already knows and previously documented.

As for a Christmas present in 2018? Might want to rethink that timeline.

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This sounds like a good plan.

To make this interesting and long term, plan on going to places where your ancestors are from. Visit every one you're able to. Well, at least that's how I like to do it. I'm visiting Southwest Virginia this summer. I'm also going to South Carolina, but I'm down to general areas these days for South Carolina. It is difficult to tell precisely where many were buried or lived in the 1700s.

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You can find old deeds to old family properties and actually visit where they lived. I remember back in the '70's visiting various counties in Alabama and my dad talking to family members who still lived there. You used to could use the phone book to track down living members, as he did. It was strange to compare my family's name in local phone books (one listing being us) and those in areas were our family came from (multiple pages).

With cemeteries, I like to use findagrave.com. I've uploaded all of my family graves that I have visited and found several that I haven't visited but others have.

If I visit a cemetery, I try to take photos of additional graves and then see if they are needed on the site. The site allows linking of family members, but that of course requires verification