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(If you have additional helpful tips, please contact our Webmaster (ghintze@aol.com) and we'll be glad to add them to our site.) Either just starting or well into researching our Family History we all welcome any tips from other sources that may help us find additional information or get us over that hurdle we are stuck at. Our members have found several useful web sites below that provided helpful genealogy tips in their Family History research. How
do I start researching my family history
How do I start researching my family history
Miscellaneous tips
Naming customs
Genealogy blank forms
Relationship chart
Birthday calculator
Researching your family history
Caring and restoration of old pictures
Aunt Minnie’s Box (By Bob Pace) Aunt Minnie lived on a farm just outside of town with Uncle Ed. She taught school and was always thinking of others in the family. She acknowledged every accomplishment by family members, whether it was a graduation, job promotion, marriage, or new baby, in some special way. Aunt Minnie was the person that arranged the family reunions we had each year. I guess she could be called the family matriarch. Aunt Minnie collected family history. She was active in the local historical society and helped with the publication of the very first heritage book for the county. She kept the historical data on the family in an old egg crate and it was quite full. Every trip they went on, much to the chagrin of Uncle Ed, Aunt Minnie had to stop at archive buildings, courthouses, and other historical places to do research. Just a few years ago Uncle Ed died of a heart attack and Aunt Minnie sold the farm. She didn’t want to be burdened with the upkeep of a house and lawn so she rented a nice apartment in a new complex. Her daughter Agnes had married, moved to Nashville, and started a family. Aunt Minnie did not want to be a burden to her daughter. Agnes was not interested in the history of the family and rarely attended the annual family reunions. Now, with Uncle Ed gone, she had plenty of time to write that family history she had planned for so long. Last year Aunt Minnie passed away. She died peacefully in her sleep, apparently of a heart attack too. About three months after the funeral I remembered all of that family history and wondered what had happened to it. I called Agnes to ask what happened to Aunt Minnie’s box. She knew exactly what I was asking about and reminded me she did not have an interest in family history. She said that when they took all of Aunt Minnie’s things from her apartment they threw away the box with a lot of other junk. Most of us are collecting family history data. Like Aunt Minnie, some of us have heirs that do not share our interest in genealogy. Without specific direction they may not make an effort to preserve the results of our hard work. Many local libraries are interested in family histories but are not prepared to accept an egg crate of unorganized papers and photographs. Some of us have used our data to write books, in one form or another, about our immediate families. That seems to be the ideal result and is easy for a library to use. We should plan now for the disposition of that good family history data we have collected. As a minimum we should make an effort to sort our data in some organized way to be useful to a future researcher. Let’s all make sure it does not go the way of Aunt Minnie’s box.
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