Curious About Your Own Ancestors?

If you have wondered just where your characteristics came from, why you do the things you do, it just might be in your genes! This blog displays photos and stories of people and places we have discovered in the search of our family history. With just a little effort, you can learn a lot also. Much info is already on line, but first do your "home" work.

Get a pad of paper, start with yourself and immediate family, and write down the "facts ma'am". .... Birth and marriage dates, cities, counties (very important), and states. Then move back a generation, get help from parents, cousins, aunts and uncles, and record the info for parents and grandparents on both sides of your family. This will include deaths and place of burial if possible. If someone doesn't know a date, but has an estimate of a year, list that and make a blank to be filled in later. I like to make a "Family Group Sheet" for each family, so that siblings and their spouses are included.

Collect clues from all sorts of sources. For instance, my father said, "Gt Grandmother Elizabeth always told the family that she was from 'East Virginia' ." Years later, and doing a search online for her father James Rodgers, I found the following excerpt in Google Books, taken from a West Virginia newspaper. There was his biography (my gt gt gt grandfather) proving the family tale that they were from East Virginia.... Madison County .... before they migrated west over the mountains. The following link leads to James Rodgers' biography.

When you arrive at this site, do a search, maybe you will find your own ancestors in Historical Sketches of Pocahontas County, West Virginia, by William T. Price.