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windchymes -> RE: Genealogy (11/5/2014 7:07:05 AM)
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If you're really serious about genealogy, you'll find that you have to dig and search and cross-reference, and no one book or website has all the information that may be out there. Websites like Ancestry, FamilySearch, Archives, Fold3, GenealogyBank, etc. are only as helpful as contributors have made them. If you can get all the way back to the early 1800's, and document it, you're done well. All the websites are continuing works in progress and NONE of them are complete. And you only get out of them what you put into them, and sometimes you just have to work for it.
Fold3 is supposed to be a treasure trove of military records, but I found nothing about the person I was looking for. I did find his complete records in Ancestry, in Marine Corps Musters (forget the exact name of the file), from boot camp at Parris Island, through his ordinance training and certifications in various places, to being shipped to Korea in 1952, to where he got his leg blown off by a land mine and was medivac'd (think MASH!) out to Japan and then back to the US to a rehab hospital in Oakland, to his medical discharge. That was a gold mine for me. But I only found that he ended up earning a Master's Degree in Educational Psychology at the Univ. of Illinois Champaign-Urbana and spent the rest of his life helping the disabled by a random Google hit.
Same person, all my digging had narrowed down the search to what I thought were two different men, where all the information matched except his date of birth. The one on a tombstone that I found in FindAGrave didn't match the one in other records I had. Name, date of death, and Marine Corps rank were the same, but the date of birth was different from the other records I had found. There was a seven-month discrepency that drove me nuts for a year. When I finally found the military record in Ancestry, the Social Security number there matched the one in the SS Death Index--you can Google that site--which meant that somehow, the military got the wrong date of birth for his headstone, and this was the man I had been looking for all along.
Some people didn't leave paper trails, and many of the lower classes didn't. They may not have filed for Social Security, they may have moved around a lot and missed being counted in a census, they might have been in prison, they might have been involved in illegal activities and "disappeared". Until recently, all records like birth, marriage, divorce and death certificates, and the censuses were done manually, hand-written, and a LOT of names get misspelled, changed, written illegibly, people use their middle names instead of first names, and you'll find the same name in the same neighborhoods, so you need a date of birth if you can get one and hope it's correct. Good luck with that one, lol. A LOT of mistakes and typos are in records, handwriting could be hard to read, and the ones transcribing it into a permanent record spelled things wrong, so you have to be on the alert for that. I couldn't find my grandmother Olga's marriage cert., until I dug in and found that they had it listed as "Alta". I had to look under the husband's name and compare her date of birth before I found the mistake. Also, a lot of people were buried in unmarked graves, so sometimes you have to go to the cemetery itself and look through their records to find the grave itself.
My point is, if all you do is type a name into a website search and cry because you didn't find what you wanted right away, or you think the site is no good, you should probably just walk away from the whole idea of tracing your family history on your own. You have to use ALL the sites and you'll need to get down in the trenches, visit libraries and courthouses and cemeteries, even talk to elderly family members or neighbors. Or you could pay somebody to do it for you. I know people who have worked on family history for decades and are still working. If you're really serious about it, it's not for the faint-hearted or for those looking for a quick and happy ending. Genealogy is HARD WORK. If you're really serious, see if your public library has a genealogy section and trained employees to help you. I learned a LOT from mine
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