Family tree

I've thought about it, but haven't started.  I did get some info when I visited Ellis Island, and they have a website.  Funny as it sounds, I have also friended same name folks on facebook and had brief discussions with them about it.  Turns out I have a distant relative living in Norway.  we chat from time to time...

for some reason, the mormon church maintains excellent ancestry records and is supposed to be one of the best resources for tracing genealogy.  not sure how to begin to access their info, but might give you a kickstart for googling?

oopss...hit quote instead of edit

Ancestry.com is great if you're willing to pay the subscription, not so much if you're looking to just use the free version.  Also check out www.familysearch.org, which is the Mormon database.  You won't be able to see most of the records, since it will just link you to the paid portion of ancestry, but a lot of the records have been transcribed so you can get all the information you need.  You just won't get to look at the official handwritten copy.  You can see the records if you're using the family search website from one of their official family search centers.

www.findagrave.com can also help a lot, if you know the area your family was from.  It searches cemetary databases and you can get birth and death dates, and tombstone inscriptions.  Some cemetaries have even started posting photos of the tombstone. 

As Teejay mentioned, don't assume the records are necessarily accurate.  I had a relative who in three consecutive censuses (censi?) spelled his name as Ludwig, Louis, and Lewis. 

Ancestry has kinda cornered the market.  They've basically got exclusive rights to the census - if you check out census.gov or what ever it is, it directs you to ancestry.com.

They do have a 2 week free trial, which, if you get laid off, you can find A LOT of info in 2 weeks...

Stuff like census, shipping manifests, lots of german and english censuses.

Quite a few libraries have free access to it, you've just got to find a way to save your data.

Never did any geniology or checked out ancestry.com.  But my Mom took a whole summer once to research the family.

My father's side is simple...  My great-grandfather managed to get my grandfather onto a boat to Norway from Germany in 1938.  He made his way to England and then to the US.  The rest of the family, all of them, were murdered by the Nazis.  Records burned.  It's as if the Nazis wiped out their very history.

But on my mother's side, she traced back NINE generations here in this country!  She found the grave and death certificate in a small town on the Hudson River south of Albany dating back to 1742.  No birth records, just death and he was 64 when he died!  About a hundred years after the first settlers arrived in that area.  AND... it was clearly a Jewish grave.  We joke about him being the first and only Jew on the Mayflower.  We have lots of Civil War records from that side of the family, even a pony express rider, but haven't found any Revolutionary War records.  Although the place and timing is right.  Before that, we know the origins were Estonia/Russia but no details.

Interesting stuff.

Every few years or so I explore around Ancestry.com trying to learn more about my dads family. My sister and I joke that they must be spies and/or part of a witness relocation program as nobody seems to know anything, or they're not talking.

When my mother retired though she and an aunt of hers spent about 2 years researching her side of the family. We knew they had been in the New Mexico region for quite some time, but had no idea how long. They were able to trace back the family in the NM/South West/Northern Mexico region all the way back to the original Spanish explorers including family members that were part of the Cortes and Columbus expeditions. If I recall correctly they were even able to go back one more generation or so to the families in Europe (which would have been somewhere around the year 1400 late 1300's) and then understandably the trail went dark. They had a bunch of interesting branches including members that came from France and settled in the LA (the state, not the city) area and fought in the civil war. Totally interesting and I know she really enjoyed the 2 years they spent doing this. I know she used Ancestry for some of the research, but I'm pretty sure the rest was from places like the NM history (or perhaps ancestry) department, church records etc. I'm sure she benefited from the fact that while my great (many times over) ancestors seemed to be adventurous, the later branches basically hung out at home and didn't move much

I'm fascinated by my ancestry but have absolutely no clue about any of it.  

I come from a long line of very very poor nomads and almost everywhere I look I find nothing.  All my grandparents are dead and my dad's gone so I'm way behind the curve.  

I couldn't even tell you which part of Europe we descended from.  OK, I'll stop with my pity party.

I agree that interviewing family members is the best place to start. Also go through the attic, old photo albums, etc. You're probably already doing this.

My second cousin was able to interview our great-grandparents before they died, and used that to get started. She spent a long time doing research, and when she was done had an extended family gathering and gave everyone a binder with the family history.

So much cool stuff it's unbelievable. My grandfathers brother was in the 101st Airborne and parachuted into Normandy and Germany during WWII, and lost an eye during the war. He was one of the liberators of Dachau, and one of the first Jewish soldiers to see first hand the atrocities committed there.

My dad is really big into researching family history, so I bought him a gift membership to ancestry.com for his birthday. The UX of the site is horrific, but my dad has managed to find out a lot about our family. We were also able to get more information on my husband's family -- he's Native American but didn't know anything from before his grandparents other than obviously his tribal affiliation.

So I think ancestry.com can get you a lot of information, but prepare to be frustrated a lot along the way. I couldn't deal with the site, but then, I'm not very patient.

 That's the primary reason we're looking, the Native American branch. My kids keep asking about their Comanche roots as they're on the subject in school and I really don't have answers. I never really knew many people in my Dad's family and that's where the Comanche comes from. I think they encountered a considerable amount of bias because of it and they tried to sweep it under the rug! My Grandfather told me the story some 20 years ago and I've forgotten the details.

My husband is Shawnee, and we found ancestry.com pretty helpful in digging up names for his ancestors, which we then used for further research. He had basically the same experience where no one in the generations before his parents were willing to talk about being Native American. His parents talked about it, but all they really knew were their parents' information, so we hit a dead end with talking to relatives pretty quickly.