Want To Find Out More About Your Bloodline?

Guess What- You Aren’t Alone!

Did you ever look in the mirror and see a resemblance to your aunt, or uncle, or grandmother? What about your children - do they all resemble each other, or is one markedly different in some way? You may even wonder where this "different" child came from because he (or she) is so totally different than the rest of the immediate family.

Then one day your Aunt Agatha tells you a story about your Uncle Ernie when he was a boy and everything she says is like you were reading your "different" child’s diary.

Genes are always interesting. Traits can skip generations and then suddenly there they are again, in someone else.

Do you wonder how these things can be? Well guess what? You aren’t alone.

There are plenty of people out there who want to know more about the blood that runs through their veins. It’s what’s recently made genealogy popular enough to draw millions of people into the search for their roots.

According to Damon Hostetler, a professional researcher based in Clearwater, Florida, who presides over several Tampa Bay Area genealogy associations, more families are searching for, and recording, their heritage than ever before.

Genealogists like Hostetler say family stories have been passed since the beginning of time. But in the last century, several things have happened that have brought the seeking of lineages into the foreground of society: mainly, medical and scientific discoveries and the fact that families are more spread out.

"Families no longer all live together in close units, and this 'spreading out' makes telling stories around the campfire – so to speak – impossible," Hostetler said. "Months and years of people’s lives are spent trying to find and record these stories. But if records are scattered and make no sense to anyone but the person who has collected them, lifetimes of work are often discarded by next of kin."

That makes organization as important as collection of data.

The first family histories were orally recorded, and memorized by rote. Just look at the way the genealogies in the Bible read. Genesis 10, for example, is called "The Table of Nations" and gives a litany of the sons of Noah, followed by lists of each sons-son, and their sons-sons, and so on down the line. (I have always found it an interesting aside that "daughters" were not listed until much later in biblical history.)

These days, however, every ancestor is important to the family history – whether they were kings or felons.

These claims proved to ring true at a recent talk on "Genealogical Data Collection" in the retirement community of Sun City Center, Florida. The room was packed with note-taking genealogists. Some, who had traced various branches of their families back to the 1600s, still considered themselves amateurs.

Of course, retirees have more time to spend on such pursuits. The thing is though, that many claimed they’d had a keen interest in genealogy all their lives and only now had the time to pursue it.

If they’d started ten or fifteen years ago though, they couldn’t have had access to so many records with the click of a mouse or by punching numbers onto a cell phone keypad. Our parents and grandparents had to spend weeks driving cross-country to go through county records and cemeteries line-by-line and row-by-row to locate some things we can now Google into the computer and obtain instantly.

And that’s the point of this website: to make tracing your ancestry as easy and accessible as possible for you. We’ll talk about ways to locate data; how to use public information; online (and physical) libraries; newspapers and other publications; and church, cemetery and obituary information. We’ll explore ways to record your family’s unfolding story in ways your heirs will treasure, and maybe even continue long after you’re gone. So let’s explore this topic together. Be sure and come back again soon. There will always be something new and exciting to help you on this site!