My Family Tree

Tracking my family tree has been a long and hard journey. I have come across many dead ends only to find that if I had pushed a little further I could overcome these obstacles. I have given some advice in this article on how I managed to track my family tree across five generations.
The first thing I learned about tracking my family tree was that sometimes getting the proper records was difficult. I would spend hours and hours searching online for records which seemed to lead me nowhere. I took many trips to various places to obtain records which I thought had been lost.

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It seems that the further back I went to track my family tree the more susceptible these documents became to all sorts of disasters. Searching archives of newspapers for death and birth records seemed to help out a lot. While looking at microfilm for hours on end is nowhere near fun, it was much better then arguing with the various records keepers at hospitals, grave sites, and the county clerck's office. The other great thing I found while searching through microfilm was I could start to read newspaper heading which interested me. It gave me more of a feel for where my ancestors came from and what they went through.

It wasn't until I was about half way through tracking my family tree that I found various websites which offered the services of a public records database. Unfortunately, the government has neither the time nor the resources to make all of the public documents available online. These search companies upload and archive the public records documents for their clients.

After having spent so much time and money on traveling to locations to obtain public documents, I found these databases to be very helpful. I could do a preliminary search to make sure that they had the documents I was looking for and then for a small fee I could then view the documents. The fees would range anywhere for a few dollars to around fifty dollars.

A few times in my time spent tracking my family tree I found that records were sealed and that I could not view them without a court order. This was very frustrating. The documents only contained little pieces of information to a great part of a huge puzzle. I thought many times about hiring a lawyer to help me obtain a court order. Eventually I found that this was really not necessary. Most of the information I needed which had been sealed by court order could be obtained in some other way.

All in all tracking my family tree was a fun and rewarding experience. I have been able to use the internet to upload my family tree so that all my relatives can view it. I have also been able to add contact information so that my living relatives can stay in touch. My family tree is truly a resource in keeping my current family together. I do hope that my children and their children will add to the family tree and always keep it alive. I have spent the last few years working on it and it is truly a work of art.

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