5 Easy Ways to Help Family History Research
Have you ever wondered what your ancestors were like? I feel really blessed that I have had the opportunity to know my grandparents and a few of my great grandparents in my lifetime. But many relatives, including both of my mom’s parents, my children didn’t get a chance to know. One way we can better come to know ourselves is by learning about and understanding our roots – those who came before us.
There are simple tasks everyone can do to help genealogy move forward to help everyone find their ancestors and deepen those connections between our past, current days, and future.
I received compensation for this post. All opinions are my own.
5 Easy Ways to Help Family History Research
Keep a Journal – In today’s fast-paced world of social media, our children and the generations that follow will be flooded with so much information. We need to keep a personal record or preserve our social media shares in a meaningful way that they will be able to access no matter how technology changes, such as in a printed book or digital slideshow. This will preserve our personal stories and that first link in the chain.
Preserve Alive Ancestors Life Story – Take the time to record and preserve the life stories of your still alive ancestors. That could be your grandparents, aunts and uncles, even your parents. While you have them available, ask them what they can remember about their parents, siblings, and family growing up.
Take Photos of Headstones – You can be a volunteer by visiting a local cemetery and heading down the rows taking pictures of each of the headstones. There is a lot of information found on headstones that is very helpful in connecting families, such as birth and death date, spouse or children can often be found near by or in the same plot, and even phrases like “mother, daughter, sister” can help in completing family trees. There are several collaborative projects that you can assist with, like FindAGrave and BillionGraves websites. It’s an easy project that is fun to do as a family.
Share Your Family Tree – Working on your own family tree can help move along family history research for others and help you find people you are related to that are alive today. You can share your family tree with your personal relatives, or share through an online resource. Make sure you cite your sources and be as accurate as possible to keep mistakes from being shared.
Indexing Records – There are a lot of data that still need to be transcribed and made available digitally, this is called indexing. It’s something you can easily do from home and will help the community have access to new records that might just contain that missing link they’ve been waiting for.
Worldwide Indexing Event
FamilySearch.org is hosting its third-annual Worldwide Indexing Event with a goal to blitz the records available during a 72-hour window and help release additional, searchable records to the public. FamilySearch.org is a nonprofit, volunteer-driven organization sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The records gathered and preserved are available to the public for free to search and access to further genealogy research.
You can join in the Worldwide Indexing Event, coming up on July 15th – July 17th. FamilySearch has a goal of reaching 72,000 volunteers to participate in the event – and index as few or as many batches as they have time to work on during the 3-day event! What a great way to get started with family history research and help by volunteering some time to help preserve these very important records.
If you can’t help during the Worldwide Indexing Event, you can still join in on the efforts! It’s easy to get started, just download the indexing software (for desktops only) and contribute to the indexing efforts on your own schedule. All you need to help is a computer and internet – or visit one of the nearly 5,000 family history centers across the world to join in on indexing and genealogy!
Click the banner below to head over to FamilySearch.org/WorldsRecords to register and get started!
My husband is really into family history. I need to make him aware of this site: FamilySearch.org/
I used to be so good at keeping journals. Now, not so much. I need to get back to it so my kids can have something to remember because we don’t do photo albums like we used to now that everything is digital.
Many people are trying to recreate their family histories. One of the best things we can do is preserve memories for future generations.
This is truly an amazing gift to those seeking to piece together their family history. I for one, would love to jump on this opportunity. My aunt is currently working on a family tree project…this is perfect!
Thank you for the great ideas! My husband has really been interested in his family history lately.
A couple years ago I tracked my ancestry and was excited to learn more about my family history. This sounds like a cool thing they are doing!
This is so cool! I would love to research and learn more about my ancestors. It’s fun to learn about where your family came from!
My mother-in-law is actually tracing her ancestry. Seems like a lot of work but so well worth it!
I have been starting to get into researching my family tree. Thanks for the great tips.
What a great way to help family research history, I am glad that you shared this!
That is such a cool idea! A national indexing event sounds like a great way to help everyone get more information on their family trees.
My cousin spends a few hours every day researching her family tree. She has traced family members all the way back to the Mayflower.
I wish I could find out more about my family and where they came from. I know I have heritage from Germany for sure.
I think these are awesome ways to connect with long lost family. I wish I had more information to go off of to connect with my family.
My brother is big into tracing our family history. I think he’s gone back as far as the 1600s. I’ll share this info with him.
I have been looking into my family history recently. It is amazing how much information is out there. Thanks for the great tips.
I will have to share these tips with my Dad. He has been working on our family history for a few years now. He has gone on trips to take photos of headstones.
This is really interesting. We have a very detailed genealogy for my mother’s family, but really nothing for my dad’s family. I’m going to look into doing the gravestone photos.
Great tips! Always great to know your family history!
This is such a great idea! I need to do this for my children.
That’s such a great idea! I have often wondered about my family history. I will do my best to participate in the indexing event.
Those are some really great tips, there is a lot I wish I had known about past relatives. These will come in handy now.
This is fantastic information for any family who is seeking to find their history. I love all of these ideas, hopefully they help everyone reconnect to their ancestors.
As crazy as it sounds, Facebook is actually very useful as well. We have a fairly uncommon last name so maybe it was more so for us, but we found two entire branches of the family tree that no one knew existed via facebook.
I would never have thought about indexing records, but it makes sense. Both of my parents and all of my grandparents have passed, so I really should try to get on this… Thanks for the push
I had no idea there were so many ways you could jump in with this. What a neat thing to work on.
These tips are so helpful! I’ve alway been interested in learning more about my family history.
Right? Me too… both of my parents have passed and I often worry that my kids won’t have good records of life before me. I would also love to learn more about my family history.
These are great tips. We are currently working on my husband’s side of the family. It’s been hard, because they really don’t keep good records. My side of the family still has our “family historian.”
My husband and I have indexed and we’ve found it to be interesting and addictive. Yes, addictive. We enjoyed learning about family and complete strangers that we wanted to learn more and more until we completely lost track of time.
Luckily for me I actually have a genealogist in my family. And on the other side of the family somebody took the initiative to write down I link back to about the 1800s. These are all great tips if you do not have a genealogist and your family LOL.
Jeanette, these actually are perfect ways for you to get involved when you don’t have your own records to work on!!