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Hunting For Relatives – A Dummies Guide To Basic Genealogy
Okay so you have decided to look up your family history. You talked to old Uncle Fred and Great Grandma Alice, collected a bunch of old photos and bits and pieces of papers and lots and lots of old stories.
Your first attempts at putting all the pieces together came quite easy, you now have maybe 3-4 generations already compiled, the Internet is great. Boy this is going to be a snap! You have also by now discovered that having a common surname does not necessarily make you or them a relative, and the more “common” the surname the more complex it will be to verify blood relationships.
If you got this far hold on to your hat ‘cause the “fun” has just begun. There are six words that are critical to a basic Genealogy search,
Patience, Patience, Patience
and Luck, Luck and more
Luck.
If you are like the vast majority of us, your family came to the United States from another country and in some cases (like mine) via a second country. Unless you have physical positive proof such as copies of immigration papers, ships logs, U.S. Court Papers, etc. you will have to start digging into various Government archives in order to locate your relatives entry port and dates.
Nothing against Great Grandma Alice, call it her fading memory and/or the Old Ways, but 9 chances out of 10 she has left a few vital “Black Sheep” out of the herd. Unfortunately, it is these Black Sheep that will most likely be the critical ones that you need to put all the pieces together.
At 52, armed with all the family information that I had managed to gather together, I set out to discover where I had come from. The process would be simple, use the Freedom of Information Act and obtain copies of my father’s family records from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Social Security and other government agencies, piece of cake. Since I had the entire list of names, birth, entry into the U.S., citizenship certificate numbers, etc., I had no problem in completing every block on the multitude of forms and sent them in. To my bewilderment, I kept receiving replies stating that there were no records to be found. Now I was really confused, the information I submitted was the exact same data that I had used on the numerous forms I had to fill in to obtain and renew my U.S. Government security clearances for over twenty years, how could there be NO records on my father?
Nearly two years had passed since I launched my simple search and I had exactly the same information I started with. In desperation, I expanded my search even deeper into the darkest corners of the Internet, which I lovingly call WET, the World’s Electronic Trashcan. After countless weeks of searching and posting every genealogy site and government database available, I still had absolutely nothing. It’s as if my father never existed! In what I can only
describe as pure dumb luck and a little help from a guardian angel, I made E-mail contact with a Researcher at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) facility located in San Bruno, California, and once again explained my plight. Taking into account that I had been down this road via the “official, filled in many forms” route, the chance of something developing from an E-mail exchange with a government bureaucrat was somewhere between zero and minus one. Unbelievably, within 24 hours I received an E-mail reply advising me that he had found my father’s “lost” files.
What I discovered in the files was what I will call the “Great Grandma Alice Syndrome”; people of that era were just not too open about discussing family secrets and the various Black Sheep in the family. People from around the world arrived in the United States to begin a new life for themselves and their children, if it meant inventing or hiding the past then, so be it.
What I discovered is/will be the subject of a book, now that I am over 60 you might say that I am a bit of a procrastinator, you think? That’s enough about me though.
To summarize what you will need to do to attempt to locate relatives that came from overseas is begin with the following:
- Try the Freedom of Information Act – Immigration and Naturalization
Services and the Social Security Administration
- If you have a confirmed port of entry, a ship name and/or dates you can contact the
National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) facility that covers that
port.
- If your really lucky and you know the ship your relatives arrived on it may have already been transcribed and be available on one of many sites. A great starting point would be
Immigrant Ships
- If your relatives were Naturalized U.S. Citizens, you can contact the Federal Courthouse where they were Naturalized. In “theory” they should have retained the Immigration records, however
in some cases they may have been sent back to NARA.
Happy hunting, and remember Patience, Patience,
Patience and best of luck in your search.
The above article was written by Robert Toy a fellow researcher and
contributor to the Our Family Ancestors database.
Author: Robert Toy
Genealogy Researcher |
