Apples From Our Family Tree

I'm finding there are so many stumbling blocks to searching for records outside of the U.S., not the least of which is the language barrier. I'm having some challenges finding copies of documents from Europe (I subscribe to the World version of Ancestry.com, so I get documents from outside of the U.S.) but I find that either they don't have a copy of the original document uploaded to their site, or it's in German or French or whatever and I can't read it anyway.  In addition, they don't always have enough of the information from the document translated and categorized for it to be much help.  I'll see things that say "1850-1900, German births, deaths, marriages" and my ancestor's name, but they haven't transcribed enough of the information for me to determine, beyond the shadow of a doubt that this is really my ancestor. I've been basically trusting Ancestry blindly, but now I want to link everything together with actual documents in

One of the branches on my mom's side of the family goes all the way back to the Revolutionary War in the U.S. The soldier's name is Peter Simpson, Jr. and I've struggled to find more information about him. All I've found on Ancestry.com so far is an application for the Sons of the American Revolution (SAR). There isn't a huge amount of information on the document, and being the novice I am, I wasn't really sure where to go from there. I've gone to DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution) and found Peter, along with the basic descendant list which starts with my grandmother's aunt, going back through the generations to Peter. I've learned he was a Private and now I want to know more.  What battles was he involved in? Was he injured? Was he ever a prisoner of war? If so, where? One document I was able to find from the Department of the Interior, Bureau of Pensions, has a line for "Battles engaged in" but for Peter, they wrote "none s

Just to be clear, I don't work for ancestry.com or in any way get any kind of kickback for mentioning them.  I know I've been singing their praises pretty hot and heavy so far and it might be looking a little suspicious.  When I got started working on my family tree, I didn't know where to start and I knew that they were, arguably, the Top Dogs in the genealogy game. Certainly there are many more websites where you can find information about your family, but for me, Ancestry.com gave me a stable place from which to begin.  They gave me....roots...if you will. 😉 They will even let you keep your tree on their site for free (at least they did in the past...I assume that is still true, but don't know that for fact). You do need to subscribe to access most documents, but it sure beats the heck out of all the airline tickets you would have to buy to visit all the county courthouses and churches and cemeteries you would have to visit without their services.  Because they h

Write what you know. This has been preached to every creative writing student since the beginning of time. It's so ingrained in my psyche, that I've had to work hard to overcome it in my writing. If I only wrote what I knew about, I wouldn't have written even half of the things I've published over the years. But this IS good advice for beginning your family tree ~ begin with what you know. I had been marginally interested in our family tree for many decades.  My paternal grandparents prepared a scrapbook for my dad and his siblings with old photos of grandparents and great-grandparents on their side of the family when I 20-30 years old.  It was interesting, but I was too busy being a young person to put too much thought into it. My maternal grandmother had a similar photo album/scrapbook, but she also had a loose family tree she had written down for reasons I never knew or no longer remember. I don't even know if she wrote it or if her Aunt Helen did. (I think

Whew! This was not an easy task, deciding how to move forward with this part of my family tree project. Blog or website? Website or blog? To heck with it all and continue with the paper stacks I am optimistically calling a "filing system?" I wasn't sure what the best platform would be to allow me to organize and share all the information I'm gathering. I was afraid to pull the trigger in either direction. Then it occurred to me that for a website, I would have to purchase a domain and pay for web hosting. That made the decision considerably easier. The blog will largely be my process as I search for my family history. The ups, the downs, the good and the bad. Certainly anyone going through this process can relate to all of those things. Maybe (hopefully) some of you will have ideas and suggestions for working around the road blocks. Maybe I'll even be able to return the favor.  I'll have separate pages for various family lines so that you only have to wa