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      Telling Your Story

      Family historians can be very good at telling the stories of their ancestors. If you have ever been to a family reunion and were “trapped” by one, you know what we mean. However, sometimes they forget to document their own lives – leaving a hole for their descendants. For example, not long after Matthew’s mother passed away, Matthew was sorting through her papers and discovered elaborate timelines of events from the lives of his mother’s parents and siblings, but nothing on herself. Although he could piece together some items from the other timelines, there was still a significant void because she didn’t tell her own story.

      Now you might think that your story is boring and no one would want to hear it. But family historians sometimes wonder why a person made a certain decision or are interested in first-hand accounts of events that happened in the past. There are some applications for your computer, such as Personal Historian (www.rootsmagic.com/Personal-Historian), that assist you in writing your story. You can also find apps for your phone or tablet that record your memories – for example, Memories by FamilySearch. If you need some prompting to write your story, why not participate in the #52Stories project (https://familysearch.org/blog/en/52stories). The goal of the project is for you to write a story every week for a year, so that at the end of the year you have 52 stories of your life.

Chapter 2

      Hunting for Your Ancestral Treasures

      IN THIS CHAPTER

      It’s likely that one of the reasons you are reading this book is to learn how to record the history of your ancestors. In Chapter 1, we gave you some practical experience in documenting your life. This chapter presents skills for documenting the lives of your ancestors.

      A Brief Message about Research Steps

      We know you are eager to find the juicy details of your ancestors’ lives and we don’t want to slow you down. However, it is important to understand a little about how to research before jumping in head first. To help, we introduce a few ideas here, and then, in your spare time, you can read Chapter 13 for more information on the research cycle.

      To ensure you are getting the most out of your research and you don’t have to backtrack and research things again, it is a good idea to follow a research plan. We’ve come up with the Helm Online Family Tree Research Cycle to help you along the path. The Cycle contains six basic steps – planning, collecting, researching, consolidating, validating, and distilling. We cover each of these areas over the course of the book. In this chapter, we focus on the areas of planning and collecting.

      Selecting a Person to Begin Your Search

      Before you can get very far in your research, you need to take the first crucial step in planning – selecting a person to research. Selecting a person sounds easy, doesn’t it? Just choose your great-great-grandfather’s name, and you’re off to the races. But what if your great-great-grandfather’s name was John Smith? You may encounter millions of sites with information on John Smith – unless you know some facts about the John Smith you’re looking for, we can guarantee you’ll have a frustrating time online.

       Trying a semi-unique name

      The first time you research online, start with a person whose name is, for lack of a better term, semi-unique. By this we mean a person with a name that doesn’t take up ten pages in your local phone book but is still common enough that you can find some information on it the first time you conduct a search. If you’re really brave, you can begin with someone with a common surname such as Smith or Jones, but you’ll have to do a lot more groundwork upfront before you can determine whether any of your findings relate to your ancestor.

      Also, consider variations in spelling that your ancestor’s name may have. Often, you can find more information on the mainstream spelling of his or her surname than on one of its rarer variants. For example, if you research someone with the surname Helme, you may have better luck finding information under the spellings Helm or Helms. If your family members immigrated to the United States in the last two centuries, they may have Americanized their surname. Families often Americanized their names so they would be more easily pronounced in English; sometimes the surname was simply misspelled and subsequently adopted by the family.

      

For more information on name variations, check out the Name Variations in the United States Indexes and Records page at FamilySearch:

       https://familysearch.org/wiki/en/Name_Variations_in_United_States_Indexes_and_Records

       Narrowing your starting point

      If you aren’t sure how popular a name is, try visiting a site with surname distribution maps. The Forebears website has a database for the meaning and distribution of 11 million surnames. Here’s what to do: