Do You Know Who You Are?

Have you ever wondered who your ancestors are? You aren’t alone. A recent Harris poll that surveyed adults in America showed that better than 80 percent would like to know more about their ancestors. Fortunately, the days of having to hire a pricey professional genealogist are over. The computer revolution has changed all that. There is a wealth of information at your fingertips.

One of the first milestones in the history of bringing genealogy to the common man was the scanning and indexing of most of the United States Census results going back to 1790. It used to be quite a task to find someone without names and places sorted alphabetically. Now a person can establish a starting point for his or her search by using a fully indexed service such as Ancestry.com. If all you know about your great uncle Bill Smith is that he lived in Peoria in the early 1900s, then it's a simple matter to find everyone with that name in that town for a stretch of 30 years with their associated details. I went from total ignorance about my great-great-grandfather to actually locating the old homestead in Ireland. I even looked at it with Google Earth!  How cool is that?

If you are willing to lay out significant coin, there are services such as 23andme.com. For a mere $200, they will analyze your saliva to determine your DNA and trace your ancestors’ migrations through time.

Web sites such as Ancestry, HeritageQuestOnline.com, Rootsweb.com, and FamilySearch.org provide an amazing number of databases: Census 1790-1930 (U.S., England, and Canada), immigration and emigration, ship passenger lists, newspapers, birth, marriage and death records, to name just a few. Web sites like these four have their own unique offerings, but they all are packed with great information. A number of special software packages are available that will help you organize your data and create an expanded family, an open source (free) package called Gramps, for example. It's available for Linux and Windows.

Another source of information that professional genealogists know very well is the FamilySearch group sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. They have been sending people all over the globe for the last 100 years accumulating a fascinating range of information. Thanks to them I found a microfilm of the original church records of the aforementioned great-great-grandfather in Ireland. Their Web site (FamilySearch.org) is open to the public. They also have regional information centers open to the public that hold more information than I can possibly describe in such a short space. An added bonus to these centers is access to the entire set of FamilySearch collections. If they don’t have something you want, they bring it in from Salt Lake City. They have microfilmed records such as original birth, death, marriage forms straight from the source records. The closest Church of Latter Day Saints is at 1320 Ridgeland Ave., Naperville.

One nice part of all this is that the Glen Ellyn Library has Ancestry and HeritageQuest databases available to patrons at no charge. You can use HeritageQuest at home through the library’s Web site or Ancestry, accessible only in the library proper.

To find the resources, start from the home page of Glen Ellyn’s Web site. Find “Online Resources” at the top of the page. This will bring you to a list of databases. The first one is "Biography and Genealogy." Opening this yields a great list of databases and Web sites. Two interesting ones (free) are the Ellis Island records of immigrants and a site called Vitalrec.com where you can order copies of birth, death, and marriage records.

It’s a heady task to undertake a search of your ancestors but the sense of discovery you will feel is amazing.