Salt Lake City Genealogy

(Article 2 of 4)

Your Genealogy Research Project.

As described in the first part of this series of four articles these are good procedures to follow, step by step, in order to be able to document and prove your ancestral line. These methods might seem a little boring to start with but if you do not do each recommended procedure you will definitely miss crucial details that will be able to prove your connection.

Continuing from article 1…

6 – In some of the previous documents that you accumulated at the start you will have located some obituaries and death notices. Visit the cemeteries where you know that some of your ancestors are buried and record the stones of the known people of interest and also record the names and dates of the people that are buried immediately adjacent to them.  Chances are you will later find that they are related.  The cemetery office or sexton will also have more detailed information than what is on the stone, or a stone might be lacking but they would have the burial information. The official burial record books will have data that is certainly not on the gravestone such as who paid for the burial and other facts that you will find no where else.

7 – After you discover the death dates then find the newspaper obituaries because they might give additional information on other family member’s names. Newspapers are one of the very best sources of clues that you have access to. Do not take everything at face value as newspapers are filled with inaccuracies, but use these obits, and death notices, marriage announcements and birth announcements to gain dates and names and locations that will lead you to other resources that will help you prove or disprove these pieces of data. Check with the funeral homes also if they are still in business. Some times you will find the records of a closed funeral home business at another company in the area. Make phone calls and ask questions to find these.

8 – After you have recorded a few weeks of data, go back and interview the relatives that you had visited with before.  They will no doubt have remembered more details to tell you, and when you arrive and show them what you have accomplished to date it will no doubt jog their memory and you will come up with some brand new clues.  Always ask if they might have any old family bibles, diaries, family records, old letters, family photographs, etc., that you might be able to copy.  These will lead you to many more details that will help to confirm relationships. This is one of the steps that most novice genealogists skip over and you should not pass up this most excellent opportunity. It never fails that when you go back to visit your great aunt or some such elderly person, they will be so happy to see you and they will always tell you something like, “I was going to call you…” because they remembered something in the mean time. Of course they never do call so it is up to you to go back and jog their memory. Besides, you will brighten their day with each visit.

9 – There are many thousands of free websites that you will be able to get information from on the Internet.  If you get serious about this endeavor you might also want to subscribe to some of the paid subscription sites where you can get actual census details online. Some of the best paid sites are ancestry, footnote and genealogy bank. They all have different resources and most of them usually have a free trial period to see if it is what you want.

10 – The free genealogy websites that I refer to are: familysearch org (the Mormon website,) cyndislist, mapquest, rootsweb, USGenWeb org (going down to the basic county Genweb pages will be most helpful) Oh and the very best free genealogy website to use is Google! You will be amazed at how many clues and bits and pieces you will find on your own family history information using Google. Learn how to do Boolean searches and narrow your searches down to person’s names, locations and dates. There is an amazing amount of material already indexed on Google. Also do your searches at books.google because there are now millions of rare local histories and genealogy books that have been digitized and are readable online for free.

To be continued on part 3 of 4.