1-Be patient and never give up. The
process of finding out information about your ancestors can be a long one and you may hit road blocks, but I have always found
that just when I think I won't find out anything else, another source of information pops up.
2-When doing searches, always keep
in mind variations on the spellings of a family's last name because of language barriers and the changes that occured to many
last names when people came to the U.S.. This is probably something you have already encountered, but I know from my
own experience that I have found at least five different variations of Jakubowski in the records I've looked at, plus the
name was changed to Jacobs after my great-grandparents got to the United States. Because of this, using soundex in online
searches is a good idea. That will help to find variations of the names you are looking for. If you're doing searches
through paper or microfilm records, look at them carefully so you won't miss any of those variations that might actually be
the record you are searching for.
3-While they can sometimes be a good source
of information, census, immigration, ship, and even civil birth and death records are not always accurate. They are
extremely dependent on who was taking the information and who was providing it.
4-Church records are extremely helpful.
If you know which church your ancestors belonged to and are able to get access to that church's records, then you are in luck.
Many U.S. immigrants, like my great-grandparents, belonged to churches where people of their same nationality belonged,
so there wouldn't have been as much of a language barrier. I have found that because of this, the church records I looked
at had the most accurate information about my family. Another helpful tip I can provide when it comes to church records
is to be wary of the Latin used in many of them. It would be helpful to have a pocket Latin dictionary handy to translate
these records. Of course, the same would also go for looking at church records from foreign countries. Some of
them are also written in Latin, but many are written in that country's language. I once looked at church records from
West Prussia that were written in German, Polish, and Latin, so I had pocket dictionaries from all three languages handy and
it made the process easier. Also, when it comes to language in those records, sometimes a person's name will be listed
in its Latin form. It is usually pretty easy to figure out their actual name because the Latin names have similarities
to the regular ones. For example, my great-uncle is listed as Jacobus in his baptism record, but his actual name was
Jakob.
5-War records, obituaries, and the Social
Security Death Index are good places to find birth and death dates, or at least birth and death years.
6-The Latter-Day Saints have microfilm and
microfiche of church and civil records from all around the world. If you go to www.familysearch.org, you can look at their library's catalog and
see if they have the records you are looking for. For a small fee, you can usually have the microfilm/microfiche sent
to a Latter-Day Saints Family Search Center close to your home for you to view. See their website for more info.
Familysearch.org also has some records online that you can currently look at for free.
7-There are a couple of other good online
genealogy search websites, such as ancestry.com, ellisislandrecords.com, and castlegarden.org(has ship records from the Port
of New York before Ellis Island opened), but some of them do cost money to access records.
