Family History by Sid

There are many aspects to researching your family history. There are the basic facts like birth date, birth place, marriage dates, death dates, burial places, etc. Facts like these are generally documented and can be found on one of the genealogy websites. These documents will help build the family tree and depending on your ethnicity you can go back to the revolutionary war or only as far as the 20th century. The emergence of DNA testing has connected people with their unknown relatives to various levels of excitement. It can also create some shock and disbelief when a previously unknown person shares a high level of DNA with you or another family member due to an ill advised dalliance by an ancestor. If you have enough of all of these components you can build a person’s life story even if you have never met them. However, with all of this information at our fingertips there are still questions.           My grandmother, Tova Kaganovich was born in the ...

I’ve been interested in my family history as far back as I can remember.  I was always close with my  Aunts, Uncles, and 1st Cousins. My paternal grandparents lived just five blocks from us and I spent  countless hours with them. As I got older I started to become more aware of 2nd cousins, 3rd cousins,  great Aunts and great Uncles.  Thirty years ago I purchased a simple family tree program on a  3.5” floppy disc and started indexing our family tree. I’ve upgraded my software twice and have dived  headfirst into the world of on line genealogy with accounts on Ancestry, Family Tree DNA, My Heritage,  and Gedmatch Genesis. My tree has expanded to 1463 names.  Much of it was handed to me by  different relatives from different branches of my family and I continue to add new “leafs” on a regular  basis.  Every family tree has a focus person and I decided to have my two children be that focal points.   The...