What event or person inspired you to start your genealogy research?

Genea-Musings posted a Saturday Night Genealogy Fun post asking the question: What event or person inspired you to start your genealogy research?

I started doing genealogical research on my family in my sophomore year in high school (1994). During the previous summer, I attended my paternal grandmother's family reunion where I had received a tree full of names. I wondered if anyone knew more about these people. What did they do? How did they meet? When I started school, my psychology teacher mentioned that she was into genealogy (I had no idea that's what this art/science was called) and she wanted to start a Genealogy Club. So, I gathered the names and recruited some folks and served as President for 2 years (until she left and we couldn't find an advisor).

I think what really hooked me was the trip to the National Archives. We didn't have the wealth of genealogical resources on the internet that we do now and I had no idea back then how fortunate I was to live 45 minutes away from the Archives (wish I lived there now...Houston is SO far). Anyway, I found my family names in the Archives and there, in the census, my first questions were answered: my great grandfather was a sharecropper. He couldn't read or write, but his grandson had a scholarship to a university and his great granddaughter would eventually go to MIT.

That trip was inspiring for me. I've been doing genealogical research ever since then. Every year, as more documents become available, I learn more and want to go out and find more. I've found cousins and documents that tell stories about my family that were long forgotten. In those stories, I see my past and my future.

Family Search Adds New Content

I know it's been a while, but I got so excited about the new content at the Family Search Pilot Search website that I had to post.

One of the things that irritated me about the old Family Search is that they rarely had any unique content or content that I hadn't already paid for on Ancestry.com. Well, they've changed that with their new content. The content recently uploaded includes more data from death records than I've seen available anywhere else. I searched the Florida Death Records for my Reddick relatives, thinking I'd find the same information that I find on Ancestry: name, date, location. To my surprise, the records on FS have the key piece of info that helps me disambiguate the 3 Albert Reddicks I found on Ancestry: Parent Names. Also included is the cemetery name and burial place. With this new database, I've found at least 4 new records in the past 10 minutes alone.

The search interface is slick, fast and efficient. You can copy and paste the data onto your desktop in 2 clicks. I did notice a lot of spelling errors though. One way to improve the site would be to add in features to allow family members to correct some of those errors. As usual, you should search on various spellings of the names you're looking for to make up for human indexing errors.

Find the Florida Death Records and more new US records at the Family Search Pilot Site. AND, be sure to volunteer to help index records so that Family Search can put even more records online for us!

Happy searching!