Genealogy-Secrets.com

We live in times that would make the jaws fall off our great-grandparents. Information and genealogy research that would take a lifetime to discover can now be called up at the push of a button. In the most ancient of days, there was no such thing as writing. Everything was taught and passed down to the next generation through word of mouth and memory alone. When writing was developed and means to store the records, some of the first things written down were the myths.

In the days of or oldest ancestors, they believed they were the children of gods, and so any myths of gods and goddesses were their family history. Myths are our earliest genealogy research records.

The Bible

Perhaps the most famous bit of genealogy research is recorded in the Bible. “So and So begat Something Or Other who lived to be 180 and begat…” These passages in Genesis and the Gospel are often nicknamed “The Begats”. In one way, you could look at the Bible as the genealogy research of Jesus. Almost all of the characters in the Old Testament were somehow related to Jesus.

Why did people start bothering with keeping genealogies? Most likely, it was because of inheritance squabbles. This would have especially been a sore issue in the time when the King James Bible was put together (1611), when countries still were under divine right monarchies. Anyone having a ghost of a chance at property or a title had to prove they were actually related to the freshly deceased owner.

The 1900’s

As recently as the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, in order to do any kind of substantial genealogy research, you had to travel physically to where your ancestors lived and died. You traced their lives through dusty, faded and often illegibly scribbled tiny lines on brittle pages in the halls of public records of whatever town you suspected your ancestors once lived, looking for any trace of them.

The two best sources of genealogy research were family Bibles and cemeteries. It used to be common practice for anyone to write all the pertinent family information in the front (blank) pages of the family Bible, which was passed down from generation to generation. Family Bibles are gold to genealogists, as they were written by the very hands the people they were researching. The next best thing was tombstones. You took a piece of paper and rubbed a pencil over the fading headstones to more easily read the information, and take it home with you.