Why Research?

If you are just beginning to do your family research, you may feel overwhelmed as you look at the list of classes that we will be teaching at the Community FH Workshop. Why do you need to know about census records, military records, land records, probate records, and on and on? A person's lifespan can cover many decades. Several events typically occur in each person's life---birth (obviously), school, military, marriage, children, work, retirement, and death. Records are generally created with each event and these are often the only thing---other than memories---remaining to mark a person's life. The created document shows a "snapshot" of the person at that precise moment and event. It may or may not include information about other aspects of that person's life. So we look for as many of these documents as we can, trying to put together a view of the person's entire life. For example, a birth document will most generally list the person's place and date of birth and the parents. It obviously will not list his children. Military records may list the dependents and other vital information. Census records will list the individuals living in the home on that particular day. You can see that the more records you can find about a person and his family the better chance you have of reconstructing that person's life. It's like putting together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle----but first having to search out and find the jigsaw piece. That is what makes research fun! Now I record the "puzzle pieces" in the notes section of my Ancestral Quest files (similar to PAF). That way I don't lose track of the dozens of random pieces of paper that I am still trying to locate with little bits of precious information. I started to date the entries and it is fun to look back on a family that I am researching and see the progress that I have made in discovering who this family really was.