A Beginner's Guide to Genealogy

Researching a family tree is fun and potentially addictive. Once it is started, it is hard to quit. Presumably anyone reading this as part of the 24th Michigan Regimental Website is specifically interested in relatives who served in the Civil War. Perhaps you already have information about a relative -- family stories, even official papers showing when and where that ancestor served. The problem is connecting that soldier definitively to yourself.

It is all well and good to say that your great-aunt Tillie always said her grandfather was a soldier in the Civil War, but you need more solid proof. Family stories have a way of combining small grains of fact with mountains of fiction. My grandmother claimed among other things that we were related to Sir Walter Raleigh (we aren't), but the path of discovery to the falsehood of that claim was both entertaining and informative, ultimately revealing several ancestors who served in the Civil War.

The first and best place to start is with yourself, recording your vital statistics -- birth date, place and date of marriage -- in short, any pertinent facts you wish to record. Once you have your generation recorded, take a step backwards in time, collecting as much information as possible about your parents and their siblings. One more step back and you do the same for grandparents, always asking for their memories of their antecedents. Eventually, you will have a good record of dates and places. If you are lucky, you will find a relative with a family bible, or even a treasure trove of old letters or newspaper clippings about your family. Courtesy of my grandmother and her habit of saving everything about her family, I had a family tree stretching back to the eighteenth century without ever doing any research.

Having collected everything as far back as possible by talking to living family members as well as pouring over family memorabilia, it is time to become the ultimate skeptic -- potentially nothing you have is true, unless you have documents to prove it. Even knowledge of your own birth date is suspect until you have a birth certificate to verify it!

A good place to find a connection to that Civil War ancestor is the U. S. census records. Once you have your family back as far as 1920, you can access the census records, working backwards in 10-year increments, placing your family in time and space until you reach the relative who you are looking for -- that great-great-whatever grandfather, cousin or uncle who served in the Civil War. Beyond the census records are birth, death, and marriage certificates, cemetery records, land records, war records, pension records -- a veritable plethora of records to firmly tie that relative to yourself.

The preceding is very much a thumbnail sketch of how to get started on your family tree. I am an amateur genealogist, working strictly on my own lineage. I have taken some false starts, gone down genealogical dead ends, and probably committed every genealogical faux pas there is to commit. However, I offer the following recommendations. Several good books can be found in bookstores or libraries detailing the myriad ways to trace your lineage. I found the following two books to be of the most use: Unpuzzling Your Past and The Genealogist's Companion and Sourcebook. Both are by Emily Anne Croom, and published by Betterway Books of Cincinnati, Ohio. These books are easy to read, contain good definitions and explanations of genealogical jargon, and have many sample charts.

In terms of computer programs for genealogy, I have always used Family Tree Maker by Broderbund. It has been very easy to use and contains good help menus. Each new version has improved its user-friendliness. I am new to the Internet and have barely begun to tap into resources available there. Much information is available with more added every day. Typing in "genealogy" for any of the search engines will return massive numbers of sites to investigate.

The most important thing about genealogy is to have fun delving into your past. I have discovered many surprising things about my family, debunking a few of those old family stories, but finding new, entertaining, and factually based stories to replace the old. As you search for your Civil War ancestors, you may discover that genealogy is as much fun and addictive to you as it is to me.

This page was contributed by of Susan Lindquist, slindquist@ameritech.net