I just started on Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org. I'm hitting walls on a few and am finding tons of misspellings that are complicating matters. Links to other sites any researchers have found helpful are appreciated.
I did discover a relative who deserted the Confederate Army and enlisted with the Union. It's disappointing to have a deserter in the family even if he did eventually serve.
I also found another relative who was alleged to have served with a NC unit during the Revolutionary War. I need to find out where I can get my hands on concrete proof of his service so I can begin the process of joining DAR. If anyone has information on how to do this I'd love to hear it.
Now that I've started it has become addictive and time consuming. Luckily, on Ancestry I'm finding some interesting stories behind the names.
Hiya wiffleball. I'm sure you must be seeing by now that you have gotten yourself into an endeavor with no foreseeable end. My dad has been a genealogist for over 30 years now. For many years he held monthly seminars at the Buffalo N.Y. public library to help people get started with their own quests. He got into it long before the internet existed and according to him most of his work is still done without the internet. It takes a lot of sleuthing and a lot of learning as you go. He tells me he didn't begin to feel like he was very good at it until he had been doing it for several years.
I highly suggest and I am positive he would offer you the same advice, that you join your local genealogical society.
http://www.ngsgenealogy.org/If you happen to live in a small town in a rural area you will have to look that up in the biggest city nearest you. You will find them there. Likewise I suggest you consider joining the Civil War Round Table as well.
http://www.civilwararchive.com/RNDTABLE/webtable.htmEven if you don't fancy yourself as a Civil War buff and even find it tediously boring or uninteresting it is at these functions that you will meet many of the people who are themselves into genealogy and you will bit by bit learn the art of genealogy from; A name here, a unit history there, and through them meet more people who will prove important and valuable in your quest.
I cannot overstress the importance of joining your local chapters of these organizations and actually attending their functions as opposed to participating strictly online. As I stated before, dad's been doing this for decades before the internet existed and still most of the information he locates is done without the internet. Most of what you seek does not exist in cyberspace. You have to physically go and root it out yourself in dusty old ledgers in creaky backrooms of county seats, in far flung church rectories and find it literally carved in stone in cemeteries.
Mom & dad have been over to Ireland and Scotland about a dozen times over the past 30 years or so and each time dad finds more information on more ancestors. Gives my mom fits. She wants to go see the sights and shop and he's spending endless hours for days on end poking around old graveyards and yuking it up with the Vicar in some itty bitty village in the middle of nowhere. But that's where the information is.
Most people can flesh out their family tree back to about the mid 19th century but that's about it. Records are scant before that. Records were simply not kept on "common" people before that time, usually records older than that were kept only for clergy, nobility and career military officers, people of importance and means.
If you have any elderly folks remaining in your family it is important to glean as much information from them as possible and record it in writing. We have boxes full of old family pictures, daguerrotypes, tintypes, sepiatone photographs of people we know are our ancestors because of obvious family resemblance but many of them we don't know the correct names to put to those faces. There may well be people you are related to who you do not even know exist who share common ancestors with you, cousins many times removed, etc. As your skills improve and your lists of known ancestors grow you may be able to look them up and find them. Dad has done that and discovered such things as family bibles full of names and dates that were handed down and as families grow and through subsequent generations such heirlooms are "lost". Of course they aren't really lost but if your great great grandmother, say, handed down her family bible to her daughter, and her to her daughter and so on, well, not everybody gets to have it and as the family grows and branches out more, connections are lost. You very well may find "lost relatives" who have more information for you.
You will hit dead ends too, as frustrating as it is, it will happen. Many people changed their names upon arriving in America. For the most part this was done to "Americanize" themselves and lose heavy ethnic overtones. Very common with all nationalities. The Irish did it because they were roundly despised by many for being catholic and if your name sounded too Irish you couldn't find work, feed your family, etc. Germans did it because of WWI. Many changed their names to leave behind their previous lives in Europe so as not to be pursued for outstanding debts or being wanted for other crimes. If "Jim Haskins" killed a man in a barroom brawl in London he sailed to New York or Boston and became "Tom Jones" and never looked back.
My first wife was of Polish ancestry. Her grandmother spoke Polish fluently even though she was born here. Her parents were born in Poland. She was raised speaking Polish in the home. When she married and had children her husband, my ex wife's grandfather forbid her to teach them Polish because "we're American now"! My ex didn't know much of her family tree and my dad helped her out a lot with her family history, mostly when gramps was off at the hunting camp because he wasn't too keen on it. In the early 20th century Buffalo had a very large and diverse population of all nationalities, largely because it was at the terminus of the Erie canal and immigrants from New York City/ Ellis Island naturally found themselves there due to it being the major route westward and a major port on the great lakes. Buffalo had more than thirty daily newspapers printed in Polish in those years. Dad was able to find her family names in several of them on microfishe in the library and make copies which her grandmother could then read and translate.
I'll get back with more later~