What is the Simplest way to find my Heritage???

Question

My great grandparents on both sides of my mom and dads families are not around any more.....but my mom does say that her great grandma was like half cheerokee...i want to find out what all i have in my blood....anything helps!!!

Answer 1

Easy! Pick the right parents; make sure your mom and your dad both have aunts who spent 30 years of painstaking, accurate and complete research on both sides of the family, and are gracious enough to share it with you.

The second simplest is to look up the supposed nationality of each of your grandparents' surnames on a reliable web site, such as

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

and tell people yup, that's what you are. Odds are that you'll be 75% right, unless you aren't.

At least you didn't ask "What's the fastest, cheapest and best way to find out my heritage?" like some fool did a couple of months ago. I gave her one method for each word.

Stop and think a minute, Sport. If you could get a 5-star 7-course meal at McDonald's for $1.98, would anyone go to "Le Maison Tre Expensive"? If you could take a pill to learn geometry, or learn history by sleeping with the book under your pillow, would anyone bother to go to school or do their homework?

If there was a simple way to research your heritage, everyone would do it and there wouldn't be all of us geezers warning you young spouts that genealogy is work. You can't look it up in eight clicks in Google, the way you can check an e-mail hoax about deadly toilet spiders.

If you want to spend 100 - 300 hours, many of them at a LDS Family History Center (free to all, and they don't try to convert you) you can probably get most of your relatives who were alive in the USA in 1850. Write if that interests you. I'll help.

Answer 2

Thomas is a british name

Everyone seems to want to have some kind of native american blood.  Why?  it is so strange to me.

however, the best place to start is with your parents.

get a birth certificate for your parents, your grandparents on both sides, those certificates will have the names of their parents, etc. and their birth dates may also be on the certificate; obtain marriage certificates; obtain death certificates

these are all instruments that can be obtained from the various states where the events took place; keep going and eventually you will reach a time where no records exist; that is when historical archives will help.