People have many different reasons for doing or at least, starting their family tree.
Some of those reasons may include things like, wanting to know about your ancestors, wanting to know your family history, wanting to know your family origins and emigrations, perhaps wanting to find biological family if you or someone in the family is adopted, wanting to find out if any of the family stories are true or not, etc etc. There are many reasons. One thing to know before you start is that Genealogy can be quite expensive. It costs money to purchase birth, marriage and death certificates, and any other records you might need. But you also don't have to purchase everything at once. It also costs money to join genealogical societies and family history groups. They can be excellent places to find records and sources. They are also good places to ask for help. And many of them have newsletters and journals, sometimes with interesting and informative articles. While there are many, many databases of indexed names, those indexed records do not always have all the details that can be found on the original record. Primary Records are the original sourced records. Birth, Marriage and Death records are Primary records. The original Census pages are also primary sources as well. Databases full of transcribed records and indexed records are called Secondary Records. Books full of Transcribed records are also considered Secondary records as well. As you create your family tree, you must always keep in mind, that every date and/or event, (as much as possible) requires a source or a record to back it up. One thing to keep in mind as you discover new ancestors and relatives, is that your ancestors do not belong to you exclusively, especially not your other relatives (siblings, aunts, uncles and cousins). They too have ancestors, and descendents, and they do not belong to you, because for the most part, they are not in your direct line of ancestry, but are merely related to your family. Genealogy is not meant to be hidden away in notebooks and on old computer hard drives. This is a family tree, and if you want to find other members of your family, then your tree needs to be freely or easily available to the world. Which means it needs to be out in the public eye - either in a book available at the library, or on the internet at the very least. The next question is to ask yourself, where will you store your family tree? You have a choice between the paid web sites and the free web sites, on the internet. The paid sites will put your tree behind a pay wall so that only other members of that same site can see your tree. The 3 biggest companies that use paywalls are Ancestry, My Heritage and Family Tree DNA. I do not know if 23 and Me allows Family trees to be uploaded or not. The free sites include Geni (owned by My Heritage but still free), Tribal Pages, Family Search, Rootsweb (owned by Ancestry but still free) and Wikitree. There may be other websites that I am not familiar with. Anyone should be able to access these websites and look at your family tree. I have my family tree online at 2 places. The first is My Heritage, and yes that is behind a paywall. The reason my tree is on My Heritage is because my family used their DNA kits to find unknown biological family members. The second place where my family tree is located is Wikitree. This is a free website, which makes it much easier for me to send links to anyone else who wants to have a look. Under privacy laws, most living people cannot be added to your family tree, unless you have their permission or unless they become a member of the website where your family tree is hosted, and add their own tree. Becasue of these privacy laws, most trees usually cannot show anyone more recent than your grandparents or your parents if they have passed. Digging up your family tree requires a lot of research, a lot of time, and sometimes a lot of money. It is not something that can be done in just a few days or a week. It is not unknown for people to spend many years following the research to find their ancestors, purchasing the records (sources) and learning so much more about themselves along the way. But it is also can be very rewarding when you finally break down a brick wall or find new and previously unknown family members. Those are the rewards and the reason why I keep doing this. Ciao Robynne
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AuthorMy name is Robynne and I love Genealogy. I would like to help you with your New Zealand Genealogy. ArchivesCategories |