The first step to any genealogical research starts from the place that one knows the best: themselves.
Starting with your own life and experiences is the usual advice given out by a lot of people that dabble into genealogy and it was definitely a good place to start because of course you would most likely know your close relatives (unless you find yourself in a situation that you actually can't know them at all). That sort of personal reflection and knowledge check is often quite personal and may even lead to your private information being broadcasted out there so maybe it's not best to post about that here, bur rest-assured I looked into it and had made sure to make a list of things that I know.
Let's skip a little bit then and talk about immediate family instead, a place one step removed from the me in the equation and we're back to being a little too public ourselves. It's not too crazy to easily do one Facebook name search and suddenly find out who the children of so and so is and figure out which one of them could be that one freak who has too much free time on their hands so that's another thing that's going to be kept in the private notes for now.
Let's go a generation upwards then and maybe I could start with stories about my grandmother? That's a little more vague and it doesn't feel that invasive as she had passed away and does have quite a number of children and definitely way more grandchildren that it's probably not going to expose my private details that quickly which is great and I do have a lot of stories to tell about her... but it feels a little odd to start talking about her right now when the dirt on her grave still hasn't grown grass yet.
Maybe then I could start with the stories of one of my most notorious family member and grandfather Salvador Guillermo Jaucian, who my mother called Lolo Badoring or Lolo Doring, who, in his audacity and bravado had sired so many children that I'm quite scared to learn of the true number that there's no way that anyone could easily figure out who I am just by hearing his name, right? So I guess I'll start off with discussing him and researching him eventually.
Besides family, I guess there are other places people could look like genealogy websites to try to get more information, but those aren't the most reliable and even then I don't know who's writing those things, which I guess does make me out to be a bit of a hypocrite if I think about it for a maybe half a second.
I would definitely trust those user-run sites more if I knew who was the ones behind them, so until I figure that out, it may not be a good source.
Perhaps this is the first time that I would be joking about the family's prestige or former high-class status (well, on our side anyway) but there are perks of not descending from poor farmers when it comes to family research.
One thing that's been a frequent thing I've been doing early on too is to get a lot of sources from people outside the family like official sites and historical articles, including historical posts from historians such as the blog written by social historian Toto Gonzalez called Remembrance of Things Awry which had seem to attract fellow historians such as the late Sonny Tinio, a renowned Filipino historian, member of the Imperial clan, and a cousin of my mother through my Lolo Doring being first cousins with his grandmother, and Norman G. Owen, a professor of history in the University of Hong Kong and author of the book The Bikol Blend: Bikolanos and Their History — a book that details the history of Bikolandia and makes mention of the history of several of its old families including the Jaucians themselves.
It has given me some basic information that would've been otherwise difficult to obtain and quite especially the supposed origins of the family, dating back to 1801 with the baptism of the almost mythical Domingo Jaucian, of which a lot of information just comes up that he was a Chinese sangley who was baptized and had possibly changed his name to Jaucian when he did so as there are no records of the Jaucian surname prior to him.
That's the kind of information that I definitely didn't got from my father's side of the family, a family of which had come from a long line of poor farmers. The best I could get is maybe the vague understanding that we my father's family probably came from Quezon Province or Tayabas as it was once called before settling where we live now but that's about it from the average farmer-descent family.
So I guess, in a way, despite the difficulty that I will probably face when trying to figure out what's going on with those old rich dead people, it's probably easy mode compared to any genealogical research I might have to do if I ever pick up trying to learn the history of my father's side.
