Doing Genealogy

My great-grandfather, Forest Miller Ferguson

Genealogy is an addiction. Once you start, you're pretty much hooked. You lay awake at night trying to figure out the puzzle of relationships and wondering where the proof for the hunch you have that John is Mary's father might be found. It's maddening and exhilarating and so much fun. The downside is, you're never finished. My mother used to ask, "Haven't you finished that yet?" No, I haven't. If I can prove that John is Mary's father, now I have two new questions: who are John's parents?

Many people believe the Ancestry.com commercials: that it's all online and all you have to do is click on the shaky leaves and voila! your family history is instantly done for you. Unfortunately, it's not that easy. Although Ancestry and other organizations like FamilySearch.org are digitizing vast amounts of information, most genealogical records are still hidden away in dusty closets in courthouses or buried in archival collections. The joy is in the search, using your detective skills to figure out where to look and then analyzing the records you find to mine all the bits and pieces of information that might be able to solve the problem you're currently working on.

When I was a newbie, long before the Internet arrived, I spent days in the Genealogy Room at the Los Angeles Public Library hunting for information and finding nothing because I didn't have the knowledge and skills to do research. I finally signed up for a class that taught me the basics of searching, sources, and organization. I still managed to add people to my tree who were not my ancestors. All beginning genealogists do this. The name's the same, so it has to be my guy. Today it's easy to find information and easier still to add unrelated people to your tree. Newbies happily build online family trees with 20,000 or even 50,000 names in them. Mothers born 20 years after their children; fathers dead 40 years before their children were born, but it's okay because it's the right name and I found it on the Internet so it must be true. Right?

This blog will discuss some genealogy best practices and educational opportunities for genealogists to learn the skills that will help them accurately recreate the past.