Ancestry/Genealogy

My grandmother researched her family so she could join groups like DAR and Colonial Dames in the early 1900s. Much of her research was done by interviewing and writing living family members who remembered stories about their grandparents. Some was done from family histories that were written in the late 1800s, though many of those have since been proven unreliable.

We have a letter written in 1892 by a distant cousin telling what that elderly relative remembered of the family history going back to her grandfather who died in 1811! Notes written by my great-great-grandfather of the genealogical charts. And short biographies that my grandmother wrote about all her ancestors from what she remembered and what she had gathered from her relatives.

When my mother began tracing her family history in the 1950s and 1960s, she mostly used correspondence, looking up wills and deeds in the county courthouse, and going through graveyards looking for tombstones and tracing the inscriptions to get dates. She also found a lot with census indexes, though not the original census pages we can now find online. Fortunately all her ancestors lived in the same county in Alabama from 1818 on so finding her relatives back that far was pretty easy.

I spent a lot of my childhood going to the graveyards with her and learned to type by transcribing the old wills and deeds. That is where I learned to enjoy genealogy and the insight into history it provides.

Were any of your ancestors Quakers? If so there is a ton of information on them available though The Genealogist. PM me if so and I can look them up.