We have ancestors that some of us are interested in past. Knowing where they came from and how they lived can sometimes help us understand how we got to where we are. When you start researching your ancestors you may find some that you will be proud of and then you may find some that you rather not know a lot about.
When I first got interested in where my family came from you had to do a lot of leg work and traveling to various cities and towns checking local libraries for records of your family that may have lived in the town at one time. I more or less was lucky to have a distant relative who was very serious about tracking down his family and their past.
This was back in the 1970's and I remember him telling me when it was possible to always take a tape recorder with me, especially when talking with older members of the family and record what they had to say. Of course during this time tape recorders were only a little smaller than a refrigerator and might require wheels under it to move it.
But these days that's no longer a problem since most of us have a voice recorder and a camera in our pocket just about all the time. I recommend that you record conversations with older people when talking about family history. I remember years ago hearing my grandmother and great-grandmother talk about her uncle Sidney Rigdon and aunt Phoebe Rigdon, for many years after hear them talk about the two I had no idea who they were.
Now days thanks to the internet you can find out a lot about just about anyone. In fact most of my research is done on the internet these days, I first started using the internet for family research back in the mid 1990's. While working in south Florida I had gone to a Walmart store to pick up some things for my lunch while at work.
Not having anything to do I walked back to the electronics department and saw a computer program by the name of Family Tree Maker. Since I had a computer at home and was interested in researching my family I bought the program. I started using when I got back home and still use the program today, of course it's been improved greatly along with computers since the time I got the first edition of the program.
Now this has come around to being a part of Ancestry.com which I also use as my main research tool. A big word of caution here, not all the information you get from various family trees on Ancestry.com will be correct. I've experienced this myself, when you start a tree and add a person, before long you may see a green leaf appear at the top of the person on the tree, this indicates there is other information which may be records from census reports or other people's family trees your relative appears on.
Some of the information on the trees could be wrong, my father appears on five other trees besides the one I have, most of the information about him is correct, but one tree has his date of death wrong, different from the other four trees. In the past few months they have improved the site and made it easier to find some of your relatives, in that it will show potential relatives from information from other trees, I've added several dozen people to my tree using this feature and while checking the accuracy of the potential relative have only found one that didn't match so far.
Another thing that I've been doing for years is going around to area cemeteries and taking pictures of headstones of family members and even ones that I'm not sure of, there is always a chance that later you may add that person to your tree and the picture of the headstone could come in handy. This is much easier to do now than when I first started taking pictures of headstones, back then I had to use a 35mm film camera and wait for the film to be developed.
But today like I mentioned earlier most people have a camera in their pockets most of the time. Even today instead of using my phone to take the pictures I use a digital camera, because with the memory cards being cheaper today then just a few years ago, I never delete any pictures off the cards, just put it in a drawer and use another card.
This way I have at least two records of the picture, one on the computer and one on the card, but since I backup everything I usually have several copies of the pictures. I actually used a picture of a headstone this week to check the birth date of a uncle, the record on the web said he was born about 1920, I remembered that I had made a picture of his headstone a while back and pulled it up and saw where he was actually born on July 19, 1919. I trust the date on the headstones more than what someone has entered on the computer anyway, I figure if they had a headstone made they wanted all the information on it right.
We might be coming up on the end of March, but time gets away from us and before you know it, it will be May 4, 2019. Why is that a date to remember, that will be when the Alger Sullivan Historical Society will be having our annual Sawmill Day and Car show. It's always a great car show and many interesting vendors at Sawmill Day.
You are always welcome to join the ASHS and the Leach House Museum is open every Saturday from 10 AM until 2 PM., with many interesting items and books on the local area history on sale. The ASHS meets the third Tuesday of the month at the Leach House Museum 610 4th street in Century. We also have a Facebook group that you are invited to join if you have a interest in our local history.
