Family History: Tracing Your Roots

by Utah State Library

Throughout history, the family unit as been and will continue to be THE strongest force in society. The family has been the defining unit in the rise and/or fall in every community and group. The socialization that is beginning to be shattered, today, in many areas show that this is the ultimate truth: Family History, or more specifically, knowing Family History and following the good values that have been built up over the years and eliminating, as much as possible, the bad values that have drug the family and therefore civilization down, will, at least place you and your family back on track! In other words, without the family, there is NO true civilization.

Many living today in this world are trying to go so fast that they are trying to run away from their family history. Some of them are living in the future! You have run across these folks, many of them might be in your family. They don’t seen to care about their roots, they don’t care what it is that makes up their past, their history, they are saying that it really doesn’t matter what happened, before.

And then, on the other hand there are continuing to be a growing number of people interested in their family history. They want to learn about their ancestors, they want to learn what came before them and how it all ties in together. There has been a growing interest in this very interesting, fun journey into the past lives of their family and who all these people are that are their relatives!

Genealogy can be considered the science of relationships: relationship between you and many more people in the past and the present that are related to you. People go into a family history search for all kinds of reasons. They want to find people that have been ‘lost’ in the mists of time, others have been lost due to dislocations due to Wars, Famines or other natural disasters where they were living, or simply because for one reason or another they just moved and fell off the grid. Some people simply think that if they found the RIGHT person in their past, they might gain material possessions or power!

The genealogical search that you are going to do can be at several different depths. It can be as simple as researching your family history back only 1 or maybe 2 generations so that you can know and show who belongs to what side or clan and to answer a few questions about those that you always hear about. OR it can take on a little more life of its own by researching the lives of every member of your family back as far as you can!

What do you think you will find?

Modern technology has really opened the door to all kinds of different ways to perform the family history research that used to be done only with a lot of letter writing, driving all over the place, phone bills that wouldn’t end, etc., etc..

You can now search using DNA. Yes, the same stuff that is used to discover who did what at a crime scene! Isn’t that amazing?

There are on-line sites that will help you go into various other family’s history to help your search.

A Genealogy family history search can be a very fun, interesting treasure hunt! Starting one of these is fairly easy to do, and, after you get started, you will find all kinds of ways to help yourself along the way. The best way to start is to have a guide prepared by someone that has done the work once and will be able to help you along the way.

Good Luck!

Are you looking for help tracking all of the information above, and, several other very important sources? Would a book that is a very informative, easy to understand, computer-based E-Book filled with Checklist type pages help you?

Please see my resource box below to find out about just such a resource.

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