Doing what I can with the United States
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 my hand. It's been more than a little frustrating so I think I'm going to begin my focus on U.S. only.
Once I have a family line traced back to Europe, I'm going to leave it there and move on to the next one. I'm hoping to build up my confidence and my search abilities and then hopefully, it will make going back further more comfortable for me.
For some of the families, it only takes a couple of generations before you're "back to the boat", as it were. On my maternal grandfather's side of the family, we're back to Germany and Ireland already with my 2x great grandparents. So by going about it this way, I should be able to get some substantial work done on both my mom and dad's side of the family (as well as my husband's) more or less at the same time.
I needed to find a way to break this project up into smaller pieces and that makes sense to me to do it this way. I started by taking one line as far back as I could, but I was getting tripped up as soon as I started hitting foreign documents. This new plan is my temporary solution to that problem.
Wish me luck!
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 my hand. It's been more than a little frustrating so I think I'm going to begin my focus on U.S. only.
Once I have a family line traced back to Europe, I'm going to leave it there and move on to the next one. I'm hoping to build up my confidence and my search abilities and then hopefully, it will make going back further more comfortable for me.
For some of the families, it only takes a couple of generations before you're "back to the boat", as it were. On my maternal grandfather's side of the family, we're back to Germany and Ireland already with my 2x great grandparents. So by going about it this way, I should be able to get some substantial work done on both my mom and dad's side of the family (as well as my husband's) more or less at the same time.
I needed to find a way to break this project up into smaller pieces and that makes sense to me to do it this way. I started by taking one line as far back as I could, but I was getting tripped up as soon as I started hitting foreign documents. This new plan is my temporary solution to that problem.
Wish me luck!
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