Explore Your Family History - A True Learning Experience

How many of the thousands of stories that accompany the life histories of your eight great-grandparents, your four grandparents and your two parents do you really know? If you have any step-, or foster- or other- persons to add to that base group, the stories to learn grow even more. I recently read of a young person who did not even know their own parents identities... can you imagine that? What a great learning experience that person has ahead of them.

My challenge to you is to learn these stories. Many folks spend years working their genealogies 'back to William the Conqueror' but fail/forget/don't bother to learn the wonderful stories along the way. Let's just concentrate on these fourteen or so folks, for now. I'd love to hear the stories you find! ;-)

I created this wikid image of my own family in WikiTree.com.

What stories did your parents tell you of the 'early years' of their lives?

The best place to start is to write down - use paper, pen, pencil or computer word-processor - the key elements of the reasons why you became interested in Exploring Your Family History to start with. Who did you talk to? What did they tell you? Did you believe them?

You and your parents are the logical jumping off point - just look at the tree (designed by Deb Spradlin, by the way). How many can you name? What do you know about them? What did they do? What work did they do? Did they go to college? Where? Where did they live, and when?

As you begin to think about the answers you know, and don't know, to these questions, you will find you are beginning to arrange priorities in your mind as to which steps you want to take next. Begin to write those down - make a To Do List, or however you handle such things. This is still very informal and you can do these steps in ways that keep you in your comfort zone. As you begin to work on your To Do List, for course, you may want to read and consider using some of the information in the other links I have provided here in this lens for your benefit in further Exploring Your Family History. Enjoy the journey! ;-)

Can you name your eight great-grandparents?

These options, provided under the Key Words by Amazon, "Genealogy" may or may not be useful. I am providing it for you as a reminder there are many, resources available to help you in your search.

Genealogy is the formal search of the vital records of your ancestors. At some point, you may find some of these resources useful to you, as well.