In the dark days before the internet, a homebody couldn’t be much of a genealogist. Tracing your family tree meant getting out and about, squinting at microfilm, digging through library shelves, and tromping through cemeteries.
Using the web for one weekend, you can accomplish more than genealogists of yesteryear could do in a week or two, all without leaving your home.
Follow your family back in the census.
With the release of the 1950 Census, this project is an obvious choice to spend a weekend on. Following each branch of your family back one census at a time, you can establish an every-decade baseline for all your other research. The 1850, 1860, 1870, 1880, and mostly missing 1890 censuses asked if a couple had been married within the year. Veteran status can be determined from 1890, 1910, and 1930 questions. The year of immigration to the United States was asked in 1900, 1910, 1920, and 1930. Naturalization status, occupation, and street address are just a few of the other details that can be found in various federal censuses.
Even though details were more elusive before 1850—the first census to list everyone in the household by name—you can still use the census to probe further back. Enumerations from 1880 through 1930, for example, listed the places of birth of each person’s parents—often an event dating prior to 1850.
Locate your family’s graves.
Tombstone research is increasingly internet-friendly. Dedicate a weekend to poring over your genealogy files for blanks in burials and deaths. Start your search with the 226 million memorials at Find A Grave. Interment.net, USGenWeb Tombstone Transcription Project, and BillionGraves. You may find tombstone images at the Flickr photo-sharing site, whose Graves, Tombs, and Cemeteries group has some 30,000 members and more than 220,000 photos.
Salute your patriot ancestors.
Ancestors who served in the Revolutionary War can be the key to striking genealogical gold in the Daughters of the American Revolution’s (DAR) Genealogical Research System (GRS). But these interlocking databases are worth a weekend’s exploration even if you don’t think you have a DAR-recognized “patriot ancestor.” Somebody in your family tree may overlap with the pedigree of somebody else who does qualify for DAR membership. Those folks are among the 7.1 million people named in the Descendants part of the GRS. This database crosslinks with files of patriot ancestors and DAR members who qualified based on their service. Even if your family was still in the old country in 1776, somebody you’re researching might have married into a clan with Revolutionary roots.
Post your family tree online.
Honestly, this is unlikely to take a whole weekend unless you start data entry from scratch. But you might need Saturday and Sunday both to decide among all the options.
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