Discovering your Family History:
An Exciting Journey into the Past

Family history: a fascinating journey into the past ... a past that is all about you and your ancestors.

Perhaps you have already embarked on that journey, to acquaint your children and grandchildren with past generations, and preserve your own life story for them. These are priceless legacies that future generations will treasure!

Or maybe you are a student researching your family tree for a school assignment.

Perhaps you were adopted, and are searching for your birth family. Or maybe, as an African American, you are trying to discover who your ancestors were, and where they were from.

You might be looking for ways to expand on your family tree research, or to try to get past some “roadblocks” or “brick walls” that are preventing you from getting farther back in your search for ancestors.

Whatever your reason for doing family tree research, it is an amazing pastime, which can, at different times, be frustrating, challenging, and exhilarating. It has many rewards - not the least of which is that you become familiar with your ancestors, and the problems that they faced in the course of living out their daily lives.

My goal is to help you get beyond just names and dates on a page; to get to know more about your ancestors, so that you know their life stories.

As you learn more about their lives, you soon begin to realize that they left a legacy, in terms of work ethic, morality, attitudes, and general outlook on life, which may have been passed down, in one form or another, to the present day.

In my 15+ years of researching my family tree and, more recently, assisting others with breaking down their “brick walls”, I have learned a great deal about genealogy research, which I am happy to share with you.

The pages on this site will focus mainly on researching family history in the United Kingdom, the U.S., and Canada, as my research has taken me mostly to those areas.

I will talk about the various types of documents, records, and other memorabilia available, and where you can locate free genealogy websites and resources (or relatively inexpensive ones), to uncover the past, in the course of doing family tree research in those countries.

However, the general concepts discussed, and the methods used, are applicable to genealogy research in many other places in the world, although the specific details of where to find particular types of family history documents or evidence may vary from location to location.

I would also invite you to share your experiences and knowledge. Given the large number of internet sites dealing with family history on the internet, it is not possible to be familiar with them all.

If you know of a great free genealogy site with resources for one of the topics I have written about, or if you can add to the information I have posted by sharing your experience, or perhaps your triumphs or frustrations in the course of tracing your family tree, please post your comments and stories! It will help others, and others can help you! Many of the pages have invitations at the bottom, which allow you to present your story and add photographs.

In short, together, we can bring your family history, and that of others, to life!