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Building My Family Tree

Posted 2008-10-23 11:45:00 by Maria Gonzalez

I have recently begun to investigate my family tree as my children are getting to the age where they want to know where their family comes from. Unfortunately, there have been a lot of disagreements on both sides of my family and my parents have not kept in touch with a lot of their brothers and sisters. To make it even harder, the same happened with my grandparents generation with brothers emigrating to the US never to be heard of again.

As you can imagine, it can be hard enough finding genealogy information, but even harder when your source of information - your parents - have no idea where their relatives are or where they went.

It wasn't until a friend suggested that the easiest way to discover my family tree was looking on the internet that I made any headway. It was a bit overwhelming with so much information available and so many websites to look through. Instead of searching for genealogy or family tree I was trying to search by their names and I got disheartened with the amount of results that came up for social networks, forums and loads of other sites. I wasted hours and hours with no results.

What a relief to have found out about public records searches - finally, I don't have to trawl through thousands of web pages with no results. It's quite addictive as well. Although my family tree starts in Spain, I have already been able to information on a great-uncle and an aunt on my father's side.

If you had asked me a couple of months ago what genealogy was I wouldn't have been able to tell you and now I am building my own family tree!