Genealogical Research

I did lots of on-line genealogical research this week, with some fascinating findings. It just goes to show "you can find anything on the web".

I found someone who has the same great grandparents that I have. I think that means we are third cousins. We are now sharing our findings about our ancestors.

I ordered photos of the headstones of ancestors buried in Indiana in the mid-1850's. You can do that at http://www.findagrave.com/. They have volunteers who take email requests and go out and take the photos.

I found out which cemetery they were in from a family tree on http://www.rootsweb.com/. On that same very extensive family tree I found ancestors way back to the 11th century in England. And they include King Henry I, one of whose large number of illegitimate children is supposedly an ancestor of mine. That particular ancestor has his own entry in Wickipedia. Who knows whether the data that far back is correct, but it is fun to look at all the same. I'm going to concentrate on tracking down those ancestors who immigrated to this country. There are lots of ships lists available on the web so I'll see how many I can find. Several of my ancestors were on the Mayflower and the ships that followed soon after.

Then there are the digital books. I ordered a county history on CD from Amazon. It includes digital versions of 4 books of Pennsylvania history and I found several good leads, including photos of some ancestors' homes.

http://www.worldvitalrecords.com/ led me to the Google book search. You can put in a name in the vital records website and it leads you to occurrences of the name in digital books through which you can search on books.google.com.

I also learned abut the GEDCOM file standard. I can export my data from Family Tree Maker to GEDCOM files and there is lots of free software on the web that can turn those files into HTML. My ultimate goal is to create a website with all the genealogical data hyperlinked together.

And best of all, I finally know how to spell "genealogy".