How do I trace my family tree back to when we immigrated to the New World?

Question

It's an assignment for school, but I'm not sure how to do it....

Answer 1

First you need to get a pencil and paper and go to your parents and ask many quesions...Start with yourself, parents, grandparents, great grandparents..etc...birthdays, where they were born....it might take awhile. Geneology is fun but time consuming.

ancestry.com is great for beginners....if you need help let me know....and i can help to find the names on there. I am a member there.

Answer 2

You can try just entering your last name. I grew up thinking Tennessee oral history in the family was probably hot air. Then I found it wasn't. I always doubted my Grandfathers story we had kin at the Alamo and then I found the orgin of the family name website and descendants and we did. This on my mothers side. My brothers, my sister and I were on it too. And our parents. And all the way back to the 1670's. Her family were Huguenots from France and came to Va. about that time. My great great grandfathers name entered in Civil War veterans web site set up by the national park service even brought up his rank and regt., 47th Tennessee infantry. Hope this helps. If you have veterans in the family and know the war, and full name, there is a new veterans web site. And if you have civil war veterans a lot can be found on the web site mentioned. Just go to a site like Shiloh National Military Park and look at the related links.

Answer 3

http://www.familysearch.org/Eng/Home/Wel...

One tutorial on the process.  I started working on my (ex) husbands ancestry over 20 yrs ago, and still have not reached all the immigrant ancestors.  That is a common thing.. genealogy is not a 2 week assignment.

With respect for your teacher.. he/she is not real familiar with what can be involved in such a project.  I am trying to be nice.

Answer 4

If you can get your grandparents to help you, it shouldn't be so hard. Obviously, some kids in your class have a lot more searching to do than others. My family traces back to the first French family to settle in Acadia over 400 years ago. Others are lucky and their grandparents got off the plane from the Philippines in 1978. Not all searches are the same.

The LDS (Mormons) has a really good site full of free charts that you can download and share with people in your family. Print a bunch of these off and ask all of your grandparents, aunts, uncles and older people in your family to help you by filling in everything they remember: http://ftp.ldscatalog.com/31827000.pdf

Once you get some sheets back, there is a wonderful free software package that you can download and start entering your whole family on there, one line at a time. Here's a link to that: http://www.ldscatalog.com/webapp/wcs/sto...

Once you get back to the early 1900s, send me an email through my profile and I'll help you get started and point you in the right direction on each of the lines. You have no idea where it's going to take you until you figure out where these people lived since coming to the New World, when they lived, and whether they had other kinds of records around them that will help you find missing pieces. You also will learn along the way where they came from and what they did once they got here.

Answer 5

For someone like myself, that is easy: I already had 2 separate lines on ancestry going back.  However, for most people this is not the case.  You might get lucky; after all, millions of family trees are on the web and printed in books and periodicals, such as the Mayflower Descendant.  So, if a generation or 2 ago, you family tree coincides with one already published, you've got it made.  However, if you can not connect to some tree already published, you have a hard row to hoe.

As to searching, here are some tips:

You should start by asking all your living relatives about family history.  Then, armed with that information, you can go to your public library and check to see if it has a genealogy department.  Most do nowadays; also, don't forget to check at community colleges, universities, etc.  Our public library has both www.ancestry.com and www.heritagequest.com free for anyone to use (no library card required).

Another place to check out is any of the Mormon's Family History Centers.  They allow people to search for their family history (and, NO, they don't try to convert you).

A third option is one of the following websites:

http://www.searchforancestors.com/...

http://www.censusrecords.net/?o_xid=2739...

http://www.usgenweb.com/

http://www.census.gov/

http://www.rootsweb.com/

http://www.ukgenweb.com/

http://www.archives.gov/

http://www.familysearch.org/

http://www.accessgenealogy.com/...

http://www.cyndislist.com/

http://www.geni.com/

Cyndi's has the most links to genealogy websites, whether ship's passenger lists, ancestors from Africa, ancestors from the Philippines, where ever and whatever.

Of course, you may be successful by googling: "john doe, born 1620, plimouth, massachusetts" as an example.

Good luck and have fun!

Check out this article on five great free genealogy websites:

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article...

Then there is the DNA test; if you decide you want to REALLY know where your ancestors came from opt for the DNA test. Besides all the mistakes that officials commonly make, from 10% to 20% of birth certificates list the father wrong; that is, mama was doing the hanky-panky and someone else was the REAL father. That won't show up on the internet or in books; it WILL show up in DNA.

I used www.familytreedna.com which works with the National Geographics Genotype Program.

To do a complete tree, you will need a lot of time and make a lot of effort.  This is much more time consuming and effortly difficult as to make any college essay/term paper seem like a snap. (I have several degrees...)

10 generations ago, a person would have had 512 g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-grandparents!

Answer 6

I agree with Ted.  Some of my family lines were colonial and go back to the Jamestown settlement.  It goes back 13 generations and I am almost 73.  If my niece and nephew's children had to do this it would be 15 generations.   Some people it might take 20 to 30 years to trace that far back (depending on the records). See, unless they pretty much remained in one of the original 13, they were migratory.  They lived in different states going westward and maybe southwestward, also, different counties in different states. You probably don't know the exact counties.   As new land opened up, people were on the move.  Also when they moved great distances they usually stayed at an inbetween place for a few years and farmed and childen were born at the in between location.

I divide my ancestry between the ones that were already here when the country was founded and call them colonial and the ones that came after I call them immigrant.

For people who have mostly colonial lines unless someone has already research it like Nothingusefullearnedatschool on a couple of his, it would be a task even for a pro.

I have some immigrant lines, one going back to 1853 and another in the early 1800s.

Teachers who make assignment like this   I can't help wonder what they are thinking. .Print this off and put it on his/her desk when he/she isn't around.

If he/she ask you to find your "family crest" or the correct term, coat of arms,  that will be definite proof he/she doesn't know anything.  They don't belong to surnames and very few people are entitled to one.

There are lots of websites. Don't take as absolute fact everything you see in family trees on any of them, free or paid.  The information is subscriber submitted. Even if you see the same info repeatedly by many different subscribers on the same people that is no guarantee it is correct. A lot of people copy without verifying.

Answer 7

Your teacher is a fool. I wish you would print this off for him/her. Tracing your family tree is like fishing. It takes skill and practice. Asking students who have never done it before to do it is like asking someone who had never fished before to head out into the mountains with a fly rod and come back with enough rainbow trout to feed 100 people.

An experienced genealogist could probably trace most of your ancestors back to 1850 or their arrival, whichever came first, in 100 - 300 hours. (Only back to 1870 if you are black.) That is two and a half weeks of full-time work at a minimum, for an experienced person. Asking students to do it (unless that is your only assignment for the rest of the school year, and the school will pay for your census image subscription) is ridiculous.

Besides that, it isn't fair. I know people who are children of an Hmong refugee who got here in 1980, after sneaking through the jungle for 3 weeks, eating nothing but leaves and snails, hoping baby brother didn't cry when the soldiers could hear. They would have one generation to write up before they go out and play. I know Mayflower descendants, who would have 10 - 14 generations to document.

You can't do it.

You can lie; tell him/her all four of your grandparents came here right after World War II, from England. That would do it and explain why you don't have an accent.

You could ask for another assignment, like interviewing your grandparents about what life was like when they were in high school.

You could go to the Mormon site (below) and find people with your surname in the 1880 census who were born in France, Germany, England . . . and claim they were your great great grandparents, then use your imagination to fill in the three generations.

Genealogy is a wonderful hobby. So is fly fishing. No one is going to learn how to do either one in a week. Your teacher can write to me,

[e-mail]

if he/she takes issue with being calld a fool. There is a small chance you mis-understood the assignment.

This is the standard answer, to people who want to take up the hobby and have a lot of time to devote to it.

There are over 400,000 free genealogy sites. I have links to some huge ones below, but you'll have to wade through some advice and warnings first.

This is a text file I paste. People ask your question 3 - 14 times a day here. By pasting, you get a long, detailed answer, but I don't get cramps in my fingers from typing.

Researching your family tree is harder than posting on MySpace. It is about as hard as researching a term paper in a History class. You don't have to be a Ph. D., but you won't do it with five clicks. Many people stop reading here and pick another hobby.

If you didn't mention a country, we can't tell if you are in the USA, UK, Canada or Australia. I'm in the USA and my links are for it. If you are not, please edit your question to add a country. Or, better yet, delete it and ask again, this time putting in the country. Genealogists from the UK answer posts here too. They are more experienced and more intelligent than I am. I'm better looking and my jokes are funnier.

The really good stuff is in your parents' and grandparents' memories. No web site is going to tell you how your great grandparents decorated the Christmas tree with ornaments cut from tin foil during the depression, how Great Uncle Elmer wooed his wife with a banjo, or how Uncle John paid his way through college in the 1960's by smuggling herbs. Talk to your living relatives before it is too late.

You won't find living people on genealogy sites. Don't look for yourself or your parents. Crooks can use your birth date and your mother's maiden name to steal your identity. If your parents were married in June and your oldest brother was born 4 months later, it isn't anyone's business, which is another reason living people's dates are not on public sites.

So much for the warnings. Here are some links. These are large and free. Many of them have subtle ads for Ancestry.com in them - ads that ask for a name, then offer a trial subscription. Watch out for those advertisements.

If you try the links and don't find anyone, go to

http://www.tedpack.org/yagenlinks.html

It repeats each link, but it has a whole paragraph of tips and instructions for each one.

http://www.cyndislist.com

Cyndi's List has over 250,000 sites.

http://www.familysearch.org/Eng/Search/f...

The Mormon's mega-site.

http://worldconnect.genealogy.rootsweb.c...

RootsWeb World Connect. The links at the top are advertisements. They mislead beginners. Ignore them and scroll down.

http://www.rootsweb.com/

RootsWeb Home.

This is the biggest free (genealogy) site in the world.

http://www.ancestry.com

Ancestry has some free data and some you have to pay for.

http://www.usgenweb.net

US Gen Web. Click on a state. Find a link that says "County".

http://www.ancestry.com/learn/facts/defa...

Surname meanings and origins, one of Ancestry's free pages.

http://ssdi.genealogy.rootsweb.com/cgi-b...

Social Security Death Index. Click on "Advanced". Women are under their married names. They are under their maiden names in most other sites.

http://find.person.superpages.com/

USA Phone book, for looking up distant cousins.

http://vitals.rootsweb.com/ca/death/sear...

California Death Index, 1940 - 1997.

    

http://www.genforum.com

GenForum has surname, state and county boards.

http://boards.ancestry.com/

Ancestry has surname, state and county boards too. They are free.

Read

http://www.tedpack.org/goodpost.html

before you post on either one.

Read the paragraphs about query boards on

http://www.tedpack.org/yagenlinks.html

before you search them.

      

http://searches.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/lis...

Roots Web Mailing List Archives.

Read

http://www.tedpack.org/maillist.html

if genealogy mailing lists are new to you.

Off the Internet, some public libraries have census image subscriptions. Many Family History Centers do too. FHC's are small rooms in Mormon churches. They welcome anyone interested in genealogy, not just fellow Mormons. They have resources on CD's and volunteers who are friendly. They don't try to convert you; in fact, they don't mention their religion unless you ask a question about it.