I’ve recently been doing some work building a family tree for different parts of my family, and it’s been fascinating!
There is an incredible amount of information available online and I used a free two week trial at ancestry.com to access that.
My family had lost touch with their extended families, so I grew up feeling I’m not related to many people. My children have had the same feeling, that they’re from a very small extended family. It was moving for me to find my family tree overlapping with other family trees that have a shared ancestor. That’s made getting information from a number of generations ago much easier, because I’ve been able to piggyback on their work.
So far the information has been much more abundant for my ancestors who have been in the US for many generations. For my great grandparents who immigrated to the US in the very early 1900s, the first records for them are of their immigration, so I know their approximate birth dates and where they were born, but not further back.
I’ve found pictures of gravestones for some of my grandparents. In English there was a discrepancy of what one grandfather’s name was, but by reading the Hebrew on the gravestones, I know what his name really is. I knew my grandfather had eight siblings from whom he was estranged, but to find them all, and know that I must have so many cousins on that side of the family was kind of …sad.
Parts of my family tree go very far back. I think I went back ten or twelve generations, to one possible ancestor born in the mid 1500s, in England. That blows my mind. There were so many ancestors to check and I had limited time to explore before my free trial ran out so I didn’t find out who was the first ancestor born in the United States (or more accurately, the colonies at the time). So far I found one ancestor born in Virginia Colony, eighty years after its founding.
It’s so interesting to think of what the lives of those people were like, living in the times they did.
Most of my discoveries were smaller but more interesting to me, such as seeing the continuation of names through the generations. I saw that my grandfather was named after his mother’s father. I saw his middle name was the same as one of his great grandfathers, and that’s the same name they gave their son.
I was able to see where people were born and died, and see where their children were born and died, watching the movement of a family. Most of my family is still located in the same areas where they were generations ago.
I also saw how at a time that records were handwritten, how inconsistent the records were. Spellings of names changed according to who was writing them: a great grandmother named May Belle was listed as Maybelle, Maybell, Mae B, Mable, and Mabel. Just a moment ago I checked a alternative record offered on this grandmother to see if there were any other spellings, I found out that she’s listed in a family tree with a different first name by – my sister! (Since it was a different name, it didn’t come up until now.) Right after that, I saw that this same grandmother is listed in 23 other family trees registered on the site – meaning all of those 23 people have a shared relative with me.
I was looking at this one evening with my nineteen year old son, and as we looked at the expanding family trees, you see a web of so many people stretching further and further back. He commented how amazing it is to think that he is here, thanks to all of these people.
Whether you do any geneology research or not, every one of us is here thanks to generations stretching back thousands of years. We’re truly all much more connected to others in this world than we know. Think what the ramifications of that awareness could be for us all, if we realized that some of those people who think differently, and act differently, who we might feel some negativity towards – may very well be our kin.
Avivah
One Response
Interesting.
My husband is the family geneologist. He uses Geni. It’s free. One of his tricks is trying to trace any branch of the family to a rabbinic figure, and then using otzar hachochmah to find works by that person/about that person which give more geneological details. If you want to invest more time in this, there is plenty that can be done for free by utilizing various online resources and networking with other geneologist hobbyists.