How do you know its true?
My Mother got me stared and I computerized all her records.
My sources for genealogy include census data combined with birth, death, and marriage certificates, divorce decrees, WWI and WWII draft cards, newspaper clippings of engagements, marriage, birth announcements, obituaries, cemetery records, and personal histories related by family members. I manage my data in Family Tree Maker and maintain a family tree on Ancestry.com. My resources include Newspapers.com, Findagrave.com, and a small library of books I’ve collected over the years. You cross reference everything.
It addictive and I’m meeting lots of family members in my retirement years.
It’s a fascinating hobby, and gives one a great appreciation for history.
But you can never be sure all the documentation represents the truth.
Yeah. It’s fun.
DNA analysis supplements and complements the genealogical records well.
Hope for some Massachusetts ancestors. They were fervid record keepers and published town books from earliest times to 1850, then distributed all the books into all the libraries. I’ve actually xeroxed original wills out of the 1600s from town halls that are reproduced in the books.
Rhode Island was a pain in the butt. They published a lot, then just started adding supplementals that meant you had to look everywhere through lots of different books. Painful.
New York was the pits. They had minimal information in individual town halls so you had to be prepared to travel extensively and visit all the churches they might have attended while you were at it. New York takes most of my research time and even then I feel like I’m getting the minimal.
Oh, cemeteries. The records of burials is a big help there. When they aren’t digging up the graves to extend the church or put in a highway. It was explained to me that they dig until the earth changes color, then pile all the dirt into a new casket. One church in Kingston just put up the old gravestones and ignored what used to be under them.