What you know

I thought that I should start at the beginning, even though I'm not quite certain when that was. I was visiting my parents - it may have been on the occasion of my brother's marriage to his second wife - and my aunt Ginnie had given me several pages of notes that she and her late sister had put together of 'our family tree'. It was a list of names, grouped by families, of my grandmother's ancestry going back two generations on each side.

I suppose she thought that I could 'do something' with it.

Well, I did.

I started playing with the names online about 1993, when Prodigy was a going thing. After a few months, I got lucky and was contacted by someone who also descended from the same line.

There have been a lot of highs and few lull periods in my search. And there are a lot of places to get advice on how to do your research. Probably the best piece of advice is to start with what you know and go backwards: write down the names and particulars of your parents; then write down their parents' information; and so on and so on for as far back as you or your parents can remember.

Start from there. The 1930 census is available - look up your parents or their parents or even yourself, if you were born by then. And then keep going backwards through the census years and document, document, document.

The one thing that you don't want to get sidetracked on is 'family stories'. Now, I will say that a good number of family lore has a ring of truth in it, and by all means chase them down when you've got some information to work with. However, don't get diverted by the tales of 'my grandmother used to say that we were descended from so-and-so' or 'somewhere back in the line we have Indian blood' or the ever popular 'three brothers arrived by boat to the US and one went north, one went south, and the other went west' when you're just starting out.

When my aunt had given me her notes, she told me that she had heard that we were related to Oliver Wendell Holmes. When I made contact with the distant cousin noted above, she also said that she had been told that the family was related to him. Since a good section of his family line is in print in a book on his father, we quickly concluded that it was probably just a tale based upon our mutual Holmes surname. IF there is a relationship, it's a distant one and more than likely not through the Holmes name.

What I mean is this - don't get bogged down by chasing the unknown when you still have a lot of the basic work to do. Stick with what you know and go backwards and build on it. When you've got some time and you have a few more family names and places to work with, follow grandma's recollections and see if you can build a case for it. It's pretty frustrating to follow a family line, only to conclude that it doesn't come anywhere near yours.