family historians club on golo

created: Jun. 11, 2008

golo url: genealogy.golo.com

members: 31

group owner: Historians_13th | Contact

membership: by application

The best way to start your genealogy research is with yourself and just start working backwards. Ask questions about your family's history with your other family members, the old timers can have a wealth of information and the conversation works out good for both of you because they usually love the company and like to recall their memories and share them.

Collect stories, ask if you can copy old photographs, ask to look at the old Family Bibles, once you get started you never run out of things to ask, look at, or research. Visit old family cemeteries, church cemeteries and public cemeteries, and don’t forget your camera.

You can post queries about particular ancestors you are researching on several genealogical web sites. Say for instance you are looking for a great great grandfather nad you know or suspect he was from Livingston County Ky. Just type Livingston County Kentucky genealogy in your browser and all of the sites will come up. There should be at least one for every county in the United States.

I have posted some links below that are free, that you can do research with, but I warn you, it is more addictive than Golo. I love it, I've been researching over thirty years now.

This first site, Legacy, offers a totally free family tree software download (Legacy 7.0 Standard) and it was rated #1 last year, even competing with other software that was more than a $100.00. I had already bought software from Ancestry.com that was rather expensive, but when I was told about this I downloaded it just to compare the two. I wish I had known about Legacy first I highly recommend it and there are no strings attached.

http://www.legacyfamilytree.com/ 

http://www.archives.gov/genealogy/start-research/

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/

http://www.familysearch.org/

For those individuals interested in the study and research of family history. Anyone can become a Family Historian, not just adults but your children as well. Genealogy is a very satisfying and rewarding hobby for the whole family.

I started researching as a child in 1972, my father introduced me to the hobby and I found it fascinating, I felt like I was a dectective so to speak. Genealogy provided a glimpse into my past and a connection to family members that I had never known of. I have found similarities in the characteristics of my ancestors that have shown up generations later, not only in myself but in my children as well.

Simply put, genealogy gives a child the opportunity to make a connection with their past! Our children need to have a sense of history. It's part of understanding who they are. This includes their own personal history as well as how world history influenced their ancestor's decisions. Tell them about what you did when you were their age, finding a common element. When my children were young, they couldn't believe that their grandparent's lived without modern "necessities."

So, ask them to keep a diary along with you. Make genealogy a family hobby, the rewards will be priceless. As a family write a memoir, take pictures,  create a scrapbook. The final format is whatever you would all like to produce based on everyone's creativity. It could even be a comparison of what their life is like compared to another family member's life at their age.

History surrounds kids, but they don't think about it unless you stimulate their minds. They primarily live in the present. So get them involved, tell them stories about their family, no detail is too small to mention. After all, the goal is keep kids a part of the family and in doing so you might just help create a future generation of genealogists and historians.