Taking a Peek into My Ancestry: Fascinating, and REALLY Easy to Do!

I think it isn’t an uncommon thing to become more curious about those who came before you as you get older. I have been making some fascinating discoveries about my ancestors, thanks to a membership I received from Ancestry.com.

I cannot emphasize enough how easy Ancestry.com makes it to discover your relatives and to build a family tree. You can easily get connected with other individuals who share members of your family tree. I found a first cousin of mine who already had a family tree built through Ancestry.com and was able to copy quite a bit of her relatives that we share in common over to my tree.

I was also able to find uploaded photos of relatives thanks to other members who share relatives with me and who have provided those photos for people to see. Thanks to Ancestry.com, I got my first look at 3 of my great-grandparents (two from my father’s side, and one from my mother’s side). Amazing!

If you think about it, photos like this usually only have 1 copy, and so they just get passed down through one particular family, leaving dozens, and eventually hundreds of people who would love to see it with no way to do so. But thanks to Ancestry.com, getting connected with family members (even distant ones you don’t know in person) is remarkably easy, and sharing archives becomes as simple as clicking a few buttons.

And speaking of archives, the records that Ancestry.com connects to is incredible. I have scrolled through hand written census data from the 1920s that shows my grandmother and her 16 siblings (you read that right!), along with the specific occupation of her father and her siblings who were old enough to work. I’ve also read birth and death records, and have been able to piece together where my family actually came from. I’ve traced one line back to Ireland, and another line back to Virginia in the early 1700s, which makes me guess that they were of English descent.

Ancestry DNA

But I’m going to take my ancestry search one step further by completing the Ancestry.com DNA test so that I can get a clearer picture of my background. Both of my parents swear that we are part Native American, but I think a lot of people, particularly in the South, think that is the case for them for some reason. I’d like to know for sure! It takes 6 to 8 weeks to get results back, and once I have them, I’ll be doing another post to let you know what kind of information I receive back, just in case you are contemplating making the $99 investment in the kit.

I’m looking forward to connecting the dots, so to speak, in my own genealogy and to having more concrete information to share with my children about their own ancestry. Thus far, I have been extremely impressed with what I have been able to find with just a short amount of research on the Ancestry.com website, and would recommend a membership. You can join for 1 month for $20 or for 6 months for $99. If you buckle down, you can find much of what you are looking for in just 1 month, and it will be $20 VERY well spent, in my opinion.

Can’t wait to give my update in a few weeks about where in the world I’m really from! 🙂 Have you ever worked on your genealogy? Made any particularly fascinating discoveries? And did you use Ancestry.com to help you find answers?