in a world where many families are more and more dispersing among many countries and cultures changing, it is important to preserve and record one's ancestral heritage. Couped with the documents and photographs and histories as related by the elderly in families it gives a feeling of having roots and belonging to a particular lineage, and part of the history of a people.
Genealogy or Family History has become a worldwide pursuit for many researchers, and the satisfaction of finding ancestors is a great reward for hours of searching.
Beginners ask, Where do I start? A Pedigree chart, freely obtainable from various websites is a good starting point.
Start with the Primary person, usually the individual who will be doing his or her research.
For each couple added another form called the Family groups Sheet, has a place for all their children and spouses.
Begin by listening to Family legends and stories. Often it can lead to a direct lineage. In Eastern and African countries ancestral history can, in fact, be traced back by various methods used to preserve their heritage. It is called Oral History.
But in many other countries, the elderly or parent will give a fair description of who they are and where their origins are.
DNA testing added to the information gathered has been giving an amazing insight into the world population. Most of all of the humans living today can trace their origins to multiple areas and cultures!.
Interesting that almost all people can trace their origins back to Africa, the East, and then to Europe and Scandinavian countries.
There are various documents that can substantiate births, deaths marriages, mostly available online through searchable websites. Dates and places of births death and marriages are important, and it does require a bit of research.
Gather old photographs, letters and even obituaries from the family, clearly marking each item with names, dates and occurrence. This you must scan into a file as paper is destructible, and can also be lost. Pictures and documents this saved to your computer, can easily be copied into your various charts, and it makes your ancestral history come alive.
If you get permission from people who you to interview, it is a good practice to record what they have to say. Even this can be added to your Family's history. in African cultures, some transcription is necessary for ethnic recitations on a lineage.
It is a good practice to store whatever information you get on your Document files and a keep a back -up of all researched material.
Documents and registers that can be used for research and verification are Church registers, for christenings, marriages and deaths. In some cases membership records that can verify locations. At the Archives similar information, and often sort histories of a clan, settlement, or family lines.
There are many published books worldwide, that deals with Family names, as well as compiled genealogies.
On-line there are many websites, as well as social media where researchers can get assistance with their research. It is a community of people who are all working together to save the rich heritage of humankind.
It is also important to subscribe to a Family History website where you can then keep your database, particularly one where your data is safe from interference. Unfortunately, this is important as many people will add incorrect data if you have your information on an open website, and it can cause hours of research to be incorrectly placed.
Many Archival records are deteriorating, it is expensive to store them and a new practice is to remove them into storage facilities, making it impossible to access the original documents.
There has been a worldwide preservation process whereby digital images are now stored and made available to researchers, online. Examples are Familysearch.org, Ancestry.com The National Archives United Kingdom.
Familysearch stores copies of all documents in digital and film format in a secure vault, in order to preserve information for centuries to come.
There are other websites such as My Heritage, Wiki , Geni, as wells as Websites dealing with specific Areas, surnames or places. Social media has a number of pages as well.
I hope this was informative and will inspire you as an individual to compile your own hsitory for your posterity.