Thanks Jamie, i agree with all that you wrote, the buzz and feeling you get when you actually crack a name you have been working on for weeks is great.
I am going to Kew Gardens next week to the National archives which should bring up a lot more.
I am SOO jealous! Tho, not really about the archives so much as Kew Gardens.
Anyway, I've done pretty extensive work on my family tree, at least as far as it exists in North America. I started where I thought I had the most information - my mom's side of the family. It turns out a lot of the oral tradition there was blatantly false. My mom always asserted that her grandfather was born in Ireland and immigrated with his parents to Chicago at a very young age. The part about arriving in Chicago at a young age was correct, but imagine my surprise when i discovered he was actually born only a few miles from my current residence in Maryland! In fact he was the third generation of his family to be born in Baltimore. I had no idea when i moved here from the midwest that i was moving back to my ancestral roots (at least on one side of the family). I also discovered that I have maternal-line descent from a jewish woman - or at least she was buried in a jewish cemetery. Two ancestors, through my grandmother's side, fought in the civil war, and both of them as relatively recent imigrants.
I'm lucky that both of my mother's parents were born in Chicago more than 75 years ago. The cook county clerk allows people doing geneological research to purchase copies of birth, death, and marriage records online for a very reasonable price. Chicago birth certificates list the name of the child, the father's name, address, and place of birth and age, and the mother's maiden name, address and place of birth and age. This is all very helpful information.
My grandfather isn't very helpful when it comes to questions about his history. He revered his mother and maternal grandmother as saints, but knew little about them, really. His father abandoned his family when Grandpa was less than 3 years old, and though Grandpa knew his name, he wasn't willing to share the information. He always told me that his grandfather (who died well before he was born) was from Germany (true) and his grandmother was also a German imigrant, though at a young age (false). His grandmother's paternal line is actually very well documented back to an early settler of Henrico Virginia in the 1650s. Census, birth, and death records are an amazing thing!
Grandpa's birth certificate also yielded his father's name and (supposed) birthplace. Unfortunately, the "For geneological purposes only" watermark partially obscured my great-grandfather's age at the time of grandpa's birth, so i knew that he was 19, 29, or 39. I was lucky to find a WWI draftcard that had Great-Grandpa's name and the same address listed on Grandpa's birth cert. It showed an age that corresponded to great grandpa being 29 when grandpa was born, and gave a more accurate birth location. From there I was able to trace my grandfather's family name back to a man born in 1683 in Philadelphia to Welsh parents. On my grandfather's side of the family I have 3 verified ancestors who fought in the revolutionary war.
Working on my Dad's side of the tree has been much more difficult, since i've no contact with him or any of his family members. I did, however, meet all of his grandparents, and astonishingly remembered their names and relative ages. The social security death index has been a watershed of information on that side of the tree - it's amazing (and also a little scary) the information you can find on a person when you have their social security number!
Anyway, I didn't intend to write a book here. Geneology is fascinating to me. I did Jason's tree and found that he shares a relatively recent common ancestor with Queen Elizabeth II, and that he is male-line descended from one of the founding families of Massachusetts. His geneology is much more interesting than mine!
For those who are interested in research, good places to start are the social security death index:
Social Security Death Index Interactive Search and clerks offices of the states, counties and cities of your recent ancestors. From information gathered there, you can start searches on Ancestry.com, which includes well-indexed cencuses as recent as 1930 and as old as 1790.
