#ancestry studies

[missmeltycat]

oh no

I’ve been doing a LOT of ancestry studies since being stuck in lockdown and I’ve found some pretty awesome family I never knew about. But THIS was unexpected...

I know anons joke about the similarities sometimes, but COME ON. 😂

(As you can see it’s still unfinished. I need to add the siblings, but HECC)

[the-green-hand]

I've seen your posts talking about your family tree, can you tell me what would be the best step to take to looking further into my own family tree?

Well, I started using ancestry.com. It’s fairly fool-proof. You begin by making your family tree, filling out as much information as you know. The easiest way to do that is to begin with yourself, your siblings, your parents, and your grandparents, if you know their information. From there, ancestry will give you these little leaves on your tree, which are “hints”. They take you further back, like to your great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents, and so on. It takes a lot of time to sort through the “hints” that aren’t correct—because sadly, no one used original names back then—and wading through the misinformation in the actual hints—like, sometimes, if a family had a baby that died, they would name the next baby the same name, which isn’t AT ALL confusing or anything. Depending on how well your ancestors were documented (immigration papers, censuses, marriage and death certificates, grave markers, etc.) you can go back pretty far. On my mom’s side, I’ve gone back to 920 AD so far, and it just keeps going. You find out a lot of interesting things, like which family members were enlisted, if there’s nobility in your family, when your family came over to America, etc. I’ve really enjoyed it. There’s also options on ancestry.com to hire and expert, who will do all the work for you I think, and to send in a DNA sample and trace back that way. I don’t know how much those options cost, but I know that using the site (for international records) is about $36 a month, or you can pay for a year at once. There are a lot of different options for payment. I began by just exploring the site basically. It’s really amazing what all you can find!