Find Your Roots

Exploring your family history

When my mother started exploring our family history in the 1980s, there was no Internet; everything had to be unearthed through letters sent to local libraries and government agencies. She tracked down birth certificates and death records, grave rubbings, passenger lists and more, all by postal mail and a landline phone. Along the way she found unknown relatives still living, names and places of many of the dead, but nary a trace of her ancestor who’d been captured by Native Americans—“the Indians,” she said—at age 4.

Now, of course, it’s much easier to find such information. Sites such as Ancestry, Family Search and find my past provide not only a place to map your family tree and questionnaires you can use to interview your relatives, but links to census records, national records from other countries, military records, passenger lists, court and immigration records, and even newspaper archives, though you’ll have better luck with the big-city titles here. Along the way you’ll discover not just your own family history, but illuminating historical insights. Perhaps best of all, you may connect with long-lost or unknown relatives.

I was delighted in contacting a 92-year old relative to discover the names of my great-great grandparents on my father’s side of the family, which in general has been somewhat easier to track than my mother’s side. My mother was an only child whose father died in his 30s, and in researching our ancestors I dead-ended against such common names as Mary Smith. Further muddying the immigration waters, ships from the British Isles routinely sailed from Ireland, so whether an ancestor was Irish, English, Welsh, Scottish, or perhaps even Dutch or Belgian, Ellis Island marked their embarkation point as Ireland.

Another tricky challenge can be names that were changed in different ways. For example, in Poland my father’s family name was Lewkowitz, but in the United States it was variously changed to Leukowitz, Lake or Lewis.

Where to Start

If you have your birth certificate and your parents’ birth certificates, you’ll have your grandparents’ names. If you go back further than 1900, you’ll need to start consulting public records. A very comprehensive source of advice in pursuing your search, hosted by Ancestry, is http://rwguide.rootsweb.ancestry.com

But don’t think you need to pay high fees for links and information. The USGenWeb Project is noncommercial and “fully committed to free genealogy access for everyone.”

Just beware: Researching your family history is time consuming, but so rewarding you may find yourself staying up into the wee hours researching your own ancestors. It’s a fun retirement pursuit—almost like a game of Clue—but the sooner you start, the more living relatives you’ll have to help you in your search.

And if, like me, you have a kidnapped relative somewhere in your family’s distant past? You may never find him—I haven’t found mine… yet—but you’ll have a wonderful time searching.