G E T T I N G

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THOMAS J. KEMP • 2012

Climbing Your Family Tree

WE CAN DO THIS!

This ebook will help you get started on a fun—and fascinating—quest: researching and documenting your family history.

We’ll provide a blank Family Tree Chart plus a Family Group Sheet, and show you how to fill them in—first by gathering information in your own home and from family members, then by searching for more information about your ancestors on the genealogy website GenealogyBank.

LET’S TAKE THIS STEP BY STEP

Begin by gathering all the family history information you have in your home.

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SOME OF THE ITEMS YOU’RE LOOKING FOR:

• Family Bible• Birth, marriage, death certificates• Old letters• Journals• Photo albums• Newspaper clippings• Family heirlooms• Family stories

Gather more details by asking the other members of your family what they know of your family history. Be sure to talk to elderly relatives—they may have some pre-cious stories you’ll want to record. Family reunions are a great time to gather such stories!

Begin Filling in Your Family Tree Chart

Use this Family Tree Chart to document the outline of your family’s history, record-ing the basic information about each generation: name; place and date of birth, marriage and death; spouse’s name.

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Begin Filling in Your Family Group Sheet

Use this Family Group Sheet to record more detailed information about each household in your family tree.

After you’ve filled in these charts with as many details as you can gather from your home and family members, it’s time to begin researching outside sources for more information about your family.

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BEGIN YOUR SEARCH

First Step: If a family member you’re looking for has died relatively recently, then a good place to begin your research is a Federal death record.

More than 90% of all persons that died in the past 75 years have a Federal death record. Information about deaths in the United States is recorded and kept by the Social Security Administration.

It is easy to search these online death records for information on our ancestors.

Let’s walk through the process of how we do this. We’ll do a typical search for someone named Katherine Shaw, who died in the last dozen or so years somewhere in Vermont.

Search for her Federal death record kept by the Social Security Administration by using the Social Security Deathfile Index, commonly called the SSDI.

You will find that index here: http://www.genealogybank.com/gbnk/ssdi/

Type in her last and first names and we’ll add Vermont as part of her last known residence.

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And here is the record that comes up—yes, this is the person we are looking for.

Step Two: Record this information on the Family Group Sheet and the Family Tree Chart.

OK. Thanks to this record, we now have more information about her:

• Her name

• Dates of birth and death

• That her last Social Security benefit was paid to an address in East Fairfield, Franklin County, Vermont

We also see that this in-formation was “Verified”—meaning that a Social Security Administration employee had seen a copy of her death certificate to verify this information.

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Step Three: Find her obituary article.

Because we have her name, birth date and death date, we can now dig into the online newspaper archives to find Katherine’s obituary.

Let’s see what more information we can find about her.

We will type in her name, limiting the search to articles from newspapers published in 2001, and see if we can find her obituary notice.

This search leads us directly to her obituary.

Obituaries are packed with critical family history information. Read them carefully and mine them for all the facts they contain about your ancestor—and other family mem-bers that may be mentioned.

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Step Four: Record all this information from the obituary on the Family Group Sheet and the Family Tree Chart.

• Her full name

• Date and place of birth

• Names of her parents

• Full name of her husband

• His date of death

• Date and place of their marriage

• Where she was employed

• Groups she participated in

• The church she attended

• Her surviving relatives

• Details of the funeral and internment

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Step Five: Repeat this research for all of your ancestors.

For all your ancestors that died within the past 75 years, begin your search with the SSDI—then turn to the newspapers to find their obituaries. If they died earlier than that, start right off with an obituary search.

Newspapers are a goldmine for genealogists—keep in mind that they offer much more than just obituaries. Be prepared to look for and find valuable family history information in: birth notices; engagement, marriage, anniversary, and divorce announcements; family reunion stories; passenger lists; and local news stories. A surprising amount of good information even turns up in advertisements and legal notices.

You can also find information about your ancestors in historical books and documents, as well as a wide variety of government records.

For each step of the process, record every nugget of family history information you discover onto the Family Group Sheet and Family Tree Chart.

The more information you uncover, the more complete the picture of your family’s history becomes. You’re on a fun and exciting hunt: good luck with your searches!

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