How to Know Who Your Ancestors Were

Genealogy is a hobby that takes time, patience and hard work. It can require some travel--depending on how far you wish to trace your ancestral roots--but when you reach the end of the trail, the hard work has paid off when you know who your ancestors were.

Things You'll Need

• Written family history, such as a family tree

Instructions

1. Start with a family tree diagram or ask your grandparents. Chances are grandparents will, at the very least, remember the names and the dates of death of their own grandparents or great grandparents, and this can give you a starting point. A family tree, however, would be more valuable as it might give the answers to even more generations of ancestors, including dates of birth and deaths.

2. Visit a public library. The public library should have a newspaper archive stored on microfilm (bonus if it's all on an electronic database), and you can scroll through newspapers with the dates.

3. Visit a county courthouse. With a name, you can peruse birth, death and marriage certificates at a courthouse. Keep in mind that birth certificates always have the names of parents, so if you find the birth certificate of your great-great-grandfather and you want to know who his parents were, you've got the name.

4. Search for information about relatives who immigrated to the United States also at the county courthouse. There might be statistics and information about what they did when they came here, if they owned land (with the use of a plat map) or what they did for a living (old city directories), or you might find a plain old voter registry.

5. Fly over the ocean if you want to know more about your ancestry. Follow Steps 3 and 4 and peruse even more records in the old country to keep tracing back to your roots. You might even find a distant cousin, and, if you are lucky, that person might know a thing or two about your shared ancestry.

Tips & Warnings

• Courthouses are invaluable resources for genealogy as they have records that can help you continue to trace roots back for several generations. This also takes patience though, as many records, as was previously mentioned, are not always available through an electronic database.

• While genealogy can be fun, remember, you might not always like what you find about your ancestors.