Austin Nesties
Dear Community,
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Family Trees
Anybody ever done research into their family tree? I am pretty familiar with my lineage on my mom's side for several generations, but know almost nothing about my dad's past my grandparents. I would love to know more about where I come from and am thinking this would be a fun project to take on. If you have done this, what resources did you use? Ancestry.com? How much did it cost you to get all the information you ended up with? Did you just do one parents' side? How far back were you able to go? Thanks for any info you have.
Re: Family Trees
I actually used a lot of public records since my Dad's family is all from Texas. I'm 9th generation Texan. I did some on Ancestry.com, called some relatives and things like that. We made it back to the Carmack or McCarmack in Ireland in the 1700s right before they came to the US. So much fun! I didn't really spend anything though. I just kind of went off names I did have. Small family, so not too hard.
I just did the one side of my Dad's side. My mom's family, my aunts did. But her family is pretty famous by researches due to the size of the family and their history in the American Revolution, so that one was easy. That one we can trace back to Ireland in the early 1600s as of now.
Okay. I have no idea where to even begin. How do you find the public records? Library? Online? Elsewhere? My dad's parents are first generation Texan, so I don't see getting up to Illinois anytime soon to search up there, unless I can do it online.
My dad did a bunch of fairly extensive research into both sides (my mom's and his) of my family tree--and he did most of it before the internet!
He relied heavily on public records, as well as correspondence with other (distant) relatives he found who had done more research into branches he wasn't as familiar with.
I think some of the issues he ran into were along the maternal lines of the family, since he didn't always know maiden names. Marriage, birth, death, and property ownership records were really useful for him--and all of that info should be fairly easy to obtain and either free or very low cost.
Good luck, I think it can be a really fun project!
Rarely Updated Blog
I know counties in Texas keep a lot of public records online. If you know where the people you're looking for lived, that would probably be a good starting point to start looking online.
Rarely Updated Blog
Ancestry.com is a great place to start!
You'll want to check with the county of residence for the person you are researching. In Texas, the County Clerk's Office will have property records and marriage records. Justices of the Peace will have birth and death records (this info may be with the County Clerk's Office, depending on how a county chooses to handle their records). For birth and death records from 1903 to the present, you can also check with the Dept. of State Health Services.
my mom's a genealogist and she does family trees for a "living". She LOVES that crap.
She's done so much research, I think we have our family line traced all the way back to when God was a boy.
She far prefers genealogy.com over ancestry (they charge for many things). The LDS library is great too. There's a library (State Library, I think) downtown Austin that she likes a lot.
I started by contacting my oldest surviving relatives and asking questions - where were you born? When? What were your parents names? When and where were they born? What do you know about your ancestors? Where did they come from? Any interesting stories about your ancestors? Your grandparents? Great-grandparents?
Piece that together, and then go to ancestry.com and start by looking up the names of some of those people your older relatives have given you. Unless your family was very small (which does happen but is unusual given the lack of access to decent birth control just a few generations back), you will likely find a wealth of information.
I've traced my dad's family, both sides, back several hundred years. I've traced my mom's mother's family back several hundred years. I've traced my mom's dad's family back several generations and hit a brick wall. It was one of those rare small families, and do you know how many Charles Millers there were in the mid 1800s???
My goal was to get each line back to where they "skipped the pond" and came over from Europe, but I got stuck with my mom's dad's family. I learned a wealth of information, connected with some very distant cousins, and really enjoyed doing the research. It's been a while since I've worked on my family tree - I'd love to pick it back up again when I have more time. I learned SO much!
Meredith, 6-1-06 and Alex, 11-5-09
Meredith, 6-1-06 and Alex, 11-5-09