Heritage Hunting for September 22, 2009

Hi all and welcome to Heritage Hunting! We will be holding our chat in the chat room at Heritage Scrap at 9:00 pm eastern time this evening. Remember that this time around, we will be working closely with Vicki of Victorian Rose Designs and her Life Book project. We will try to work about a week ahead of her so that when you get to her week, you will have a strong historical and genealogical background regarding her topic. You'll be all ready to scrap an interesting and complete page for your subject's book!

This week we will work on Childhood information. I've done lessons on Family Group Sheets and the United States Census for the genealogical side of researching your subject's childhood. So now I will give you some information on the researching the historical side.

If you ever have any specific questions about your subject or anyone in your family tree, please bring them to chat and we'll try to find some answers for you!

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Genealogy: Researching and recording a person's childhood

Family Group Sheets

The United States Census

There are other sites and ways to do this part of your research. Please bring your ideas to chat!!


Historical: Researching earlier times

Whenever you want to research a particular topic but want to go back in time instead of current information, just add the year at the end of your search string. You can also add regions or states to your search string with varying degrees of success - sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't - depends on what search engine you use. The example *farming life 1830 Black Swamp* gives lots of good links. That is the area of Ohio where I live and also where my ancestors, who were farmers, lived also. This works well for historical research but not for genealogical research of names, etc. Examples would be:

toys 1840 or toys 1840 France
sports 1910 or sports 1910 United States
farming life 1830 or farming life 1830 Black Swamp

You may also want to search for state, county, or city Historical Societies or Museums for links to local history in your ancestor's area. Oftentimes, these types of resources may even have valuable information on your family line if they were prominent in the area or if their descendants left documents or artifacts to the museum or society. They may have local photographs that you can scan and add to your layouts to *flesh* them out and show more than the usual name, date, place type information. Sometimes these organizations have web pages and sometimes they don't have internet data available. You may have to actually resort to *snail mail* when making your request!

With today's internet, there are virtually unlimited resources available to you regarding any sort of information you could possibly want! If you need help using a search engine or need tips with your particular topic, please pm me and I'll do my best to help you. If you have any tips or special resources that you use, please bring them to chat with you!!!

(Wordart is courtesy of Victorian Rose Designs)