It is never too early or too late to start working on your family tree. Some of us here are young, some of us were young when we started and have aged a bit, and others were older when they finally began working on their family tree. All of us though have a common bond between us and that is a love for family history.

Everyone approaches working on a family tree from a different view and most have their own personal interests in doing genealogy. Some only like to work on just their surname and stop once they have gotten as far back as they can. Some only like to work on their direct lineage only and do very little work on cousins, aunts and uncles, grandaunts and granduncles, great grandaunts and great granduncles, and so on. Some only like paper documents and records pertaining to their heritage, some like to collect family memento’s, and some like to collect old photographs of the different family members. Everyone’s preference is different, everyone can decide for themselves which is the way they want to work on their family tree, and no one way is right. The important thing to remember is that we each are remembering those that came before us in our own way and we are making an effort to preserve this ancestral history.

Some of us have been very lucky while doing our research, in that family members kept records, kept good records, and would freely share these records. Some of us have been at the right place at the right time and found a great deal of information. Some of us have been lucky enough to cross paths with the most delightful, nice, helpful, and unselfish people you could ever hope to meet while doing research. Some of us just happened to have relatives who lived in areas where never Sherman came through during the Civil War, where the courthouse never burned down, the library never flooded, the parish records were preserved, and their relatives lived in an area that maintained their old tax records and such. However, this is not always the case. We have met those who have struggle for years trying to find information, as their ancestors always seemed to move just before the census, decade after decade, or the census taker would misspell their name. Others have found that their ancestors lived in the problem areas mentioned above, and almost all the records for that area are missing. Some have had the cemeteries of their ancestors moved in the name of progress, only to find that no one kept a record of where the graves were moved to. Usually though, somewhere, somebody has a record that you have not been able to find, to prove that important link, but you do not know who that person is. So, do not give up, because you never know what is right around that corner. Click on the icon below to learn Help Hints and examples of who to contact and why.

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