I haven't posted much recently because for 2 weeks I pretty much spent all my free time (and all my internet time) on ancestry.com. Several months ago my uncle emailed around some scanned death certificates for a grandfather and a great-grandfather of my grandmother. One was born in Ireland and the other in Germany, but no one in the family had much information. Thinking I should take advantage of my proximity to any records and the free time unemployment gives, I decided I should do a little genealogical research.
At first I tried to research without paying anything, but I've discovered that many of the best websites have some kind of subscription requirement. I guess it makes sense because they have to run huge databases and scan and transcribe millions of records. I did find a very good free LDS website, but it's complimentary to ancestry.com and not a replacement.
Ancestry is rather expensive ($19 a month or $299 for a year), so I just started with the free 14 day trial. This meant spending as much time as possible on the website finding documents before the free trial ended*. They do offer a number of free services, including their webinars which are very good for explaining how to get started and how to research, but scans of the original documents are only for subscribers.
Several people have asked me why I suddenly got so into genealogy. The answer is that it connects me to history and places. For now, I've found the couple that left Germany with their first son in 1870 and moved to Chicago. In 1900 they went back to Germany for a trip. I was really surprised to learn this because I would have assumed that all the people who left the "old country" never saw their family again. It took me a while to figure out which city they left from because the city listed, Stettin, was no where to be found in Germany. My German-speaking Belgian friend helped me search and we figured out where the city went: it's now Szczecin, Poland. You learn about borders moving because of wars, but this really brings it alive.
To research any further, I have to go into German records. My Belgian friend can help me a bit, but genealogy means scrolling through pages and pages of records, so I'm using this as an impetus to finally start learning German. I found a cd-rom based method at the library and I've just booted it up (had to install a virtual Windows system on my Mac...). I'm still practicing repeating vowels and letters, but so far so good. It has a voice recognition system and evaluates how well you reproduce the words. In a few weeks I'll have to report back about how the rest of "Parlons Allemand" is. It's pretty old (1998), but there are lessons, videos and games.
*Ancestry.com has two categories of info you can pay to access: US archives, and "World" archives (Canada, UK, Germany, Sweden, France, Australia....). The English language world archives seem much more complete than the German and French resources (the only ones I checked). The French archives are particularly poor. If you have French roots or want to look up the family of someone French, I wouldn't suggest paying to use Ancestry. For now I don't know which site is best for French genealogy.
2 comments:
I was really into geneaology while we were living in Normandy. I discovered that one of my great (a bajillion greats) grandfathers served in william the conquerer's court, and another one founded the women's abbey in Caen. After doing some digging I was told that the churches have excellent records that should be free to the public, but we moved to the north before I ever had time to go and ask.
Always an excuse for a trip! I've always wanted to visit Berlin, but now that I know my ancestors came from towns not that far north of Berlin, I feel like there's an extra reason to go there (besides being a tourist).
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