I have been working on putting together my family tree. This is something I simply don’t have a lot of time to devote to, so I am doing it in small pieces. This week, I decided to see if I could locate information about a family member who meant a lot to me. To my surprise, I found my grandmother!
I must admit, I am not an expert genealogist. If I were, I suppose I would have completed most of my family tree by now. Instead, I have scattered notes with scribbled, haphazard, portions of my family tree, and some vague ideas of how to put it all together.
After making the decision to start working on my family tree – for real this time – I followed some advice that I had heard many times before. Start with yourself, and work your way through your family tree from there. My attempt failed miserably. I couldn’t find myself in any genealogy database that I encountered.
This time, I decided to follow a second piece of advice that I have heard. Start with the oldest relative or ancestor that you can think of. It helps to pick one that you know the full name of, and that you have a good idea of their birth date and death date. For me, this relative would be my paternal grandmother. For the purposes of blogging, I’m gonna call this relative “Grandma P.”. (P stands for paternal).
MyHeritage seemed like a good place to start, especially since it is one of the websites that genealogists can use for free. I typed in her first name, middle name, and married surname. To my surprise, I got a matching result!
What came up was a list of people who had names similar to “Grandma P.” It showed her birth date and death date, and last residence. I have memorized her birthday and remember very clearly the day she died. The address that appeared was one I recognized, and was also correct. This was really exciting!
The info from MyHeritage indicated that it came from the Social Security Death Index, (or SSDI), so that became my next stop. Again, I typed the first name of “Grandma P.” , her middle initial, and her married surname.
At this point, the SSDI asked me to sign in. I guess the actual website is called Genealogy Bank.com. It was free to sign in, and I got a confirmation email almost instantly.
There was a link that allowed me to search for obituaries that appeared in newspapers. Although I was unable to find an obituary for “Grandma P.” today, I did find a brief amount if information about an obituary for another relative. It was for a daughter of “Grandma P.”, whom I will refer to as “Aunt Z.”. I can’t read the obituary without buying a membership to Genealogy Bank, so I will have to search other sources the next time I work on my family tree.
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