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Where do you even begin in researching your family tree? Here are some simple steps to get started finding out about your ancestors. 

1 Start with what you know. Using first the ancestral chart, fill in everything you know, starting with you. Search online for ancestral chart to find examples. Do the same with the Family Group Sheets, one sheet for each couple on your Ancestral Chart. Gather any photos you have of any of the people on your chart or any photos that you’re unsure of who they are.

2 Find out what your family knows. Take your charts and photos and talk to your siblings, parents, uncles and aunts, grandparents, cousins, etc. Use the charts and photos to help jog people’s memories. Ask to make copies of any documents, family Bibles, or photos they may have. Make notes on what everyone says and add the information to your charts.

3 Visit libraries, especially in areas your family lived in. Libraries have many resources such as school yearbooks, cemetery records, and other family histories that may include your ancestors. Ask the librarian if they have a genealogist on staff that could help you locate records. Some libraries specialize in genealogy, so make a few calls to find one nearest you for searching census or newspaper records. (See Step 6 if you’re really serious.)

4 Visit government buildings that house records in areas your family lived in. Get copies of records, such as birth certificates, marriage licenses, death certificates. These often have maiden names, parents’ names and other information that you may be looking for or need to verify.

5 Go online. There are a number of free family search sites, like Rootsweb, where you can search other family trees to find others who are researching your family. There are passenger lists you can find. Even simply searching for a person’s name often reveals sources of information.

6 Subscribe to online search sites. To go even further you can subscribe to a site like Ancestry where you have access to thousands of records, including census and military records. These are easily searchable and will save you a lot of time if you’re serious about your search. If going this route, make it Step 3, using Steps 3 through 5 above to enhance this step.

Tips & Warnings

>Write everything down. Sometimes you’ll get conflicting information. Write it all down and do what you can later to verify

what is correct.

>Use a tape recorder so you get all the details of any family story you might hear.

>Write down your source when you write down information, whether it’s a person or a book or newspaper. If you get

conflicting information later you’ll want to gauge which source is more reliable. You may want to look up the source later to

verify or check your facts. It’s easier when you have that information at your fingertips.

>Do not rely on a tape recorder. Take notes, in case the tape recorder fails or background noise makes voices

indistinguishable.

>Don’t expect to be able to find every ancestor. Certain families are easy to find records of. Others just seem to disappear

and all you can do is keep digging.

>Just because you find information in someone’s family tree doesn’t mean it’s accurate. Many people have a research style

that is basically, whatever they find they include it, whether they’ve verified it or not. So be careful. Even getting several

sources with the same info doesn’t always mean anything more than they are getting their info from each other.

I wonder what will happen when people get to heaven and they see someone that they don’t think should be there. We make a lot of judgments here on earth about who will and will not be in heaven. Even though we’re clearly told in Scripture not to judge, still we all have our own sense of what is and is not allowed in heaven. What happens if, when we get to heaven, we find out that our sense of justice is found to be wrong and we see someone who shouldn’t be there? There are whole people groups that other groups don’t recognize as being saved: Catholic, Mormon, Jehovah’s Witness. Or what about all the little cults like Jim Jones lead, or the one my friend, Pat, came out of, an Amish-Jewish cult?

I’ve read a few stories of people who have been in cults, including Pat’s, and the common thread I’ve seen in all of them is that God is there. Even though the leaders are teaching blatantly false teaching, God is there. Even though the followers are walking down a wrong path, doing things that they shouldn’t be doing, being abused and even abusing each other, God is there. God is there loving, teaching, directing, nudging any who will listen toward the truth. So what if there are some (and I’m sure there are) who are being taught complete falsehoods within any group that some may think is false religion… what if some of them end up in heaven because they saw God and heeded His nudging? Even though they didn’t renounce the group they were in. What if there are actual leaders of some of these groups in heaven?! What if Hitler is in heaven when we show up?

Was the parable of the Prodigal Son that Jesus taught more that just about teaching us here? Will we possibly get that lesson when we go “home” to heaven and find out that there are people there that we say, “What is this, God?! Did we not slave in the mission field, sacrifice a cushy life-style in order to fund helping the very people that these men abused and persecuted?! How could You let them come “home”? They don’t belong here anymore. They made their choice to go off and live a life separate from us.”Will Jesus have to remind us of the Prodigal Son parable (which we should maybe call the Judgmental Brother parable) when we get to heaven? Or will we see clearly when we get there that our petty judgments of others were wrong all along?

I wonder if we can sweep our society with a revolution of being the mature older brother who loves the prodigals as Jesus does, welcoming them in, dirt and all, helping them learn, through our love, how to live. Because they aren’t getting that message through our judgment.

Once when I was in summer camp… I was probably ten or eleven… the camp director, who we’d gotten to know over the week of camp, went around one day saying, “Follow me.” He wouldn’t say anything else. That evening he talked about the story in Mark 1 how Jesus approached fishermen and said “Follow Me,” and how those that obeyed without question became His disciples.

That always bothered me that someone would just hear someone say Follow Me and they would just go. That never made sense. But that’s the way people usually present the story of Jesus and the fishermen.

So, I read Mark 1 today where that account is given. It’s interesting to note that in verse 14 Mark tells how Jesus was going throughout Galilee preaching. Then in verse 16 he tells how Jesus called the fishermen. Doubtless Peter and the other fishermen had heard Jesus preach and knew what He was about before they just dropped everything and followed Him.

The thing my camp director missed was that the kids at camp knew who he was. If some stranger (even if he’d been a hugely wonderful and generous person) had come up to the same kids and said, “Follow me,” they wouldn’t have done it. I don’t think the fishermen would have either, if they didn’t know who Jesus was. They didn’t know Who He was, but they’d become familiar with Him and He was probably that personality in the culture that everyone was talking about and was attracted to and the fact that He was asking them to follow Him… heck, yeah, I’m ready now! There’s no record of anyone saying no.

Some would interpret that to mean that He only asked those who were “chosen” or that He knew they would say yes, so that’s why He asked them.  But that’s missing the point. It’s significant that everyone He asked just up and went without question. I think it speaks to His growing popularity and that people liked what they were hearing. He was a breath of fresh air. Jesus was stirring up the culture, speaking to what the common people needed. So, when He called the common people, they responded enthusiastically. If Jesus had just showed up in town and walked out to the “docks” and said, “Follow Me,” they would not have gone with Him.

Though the disciples undoubtedly followed Jesus because of His charisma, they stuck with Him because their knowledge slowly grew that He was God, the Messiah. They didn’t fully get that until after His death and resurrection. Jesus’ frequent impatience with them indicates that they weren’t getting it. They knew he was the Son of God (the “Who do men say that I am” story), yet there was this “duh” factor. It was like after He appeared to them, after rising from death, they all of a sudden got all the light bulbs turned on. “Now I get it!”

I was watching 60 Minutes and they were doing this story on dust explosions in factories and how the government isn’t doing what it should about it. OSHA’s guy is saying how the housekeeping law covers the problem if the factories would just comply, but Congress was raking him over the coals for not introducing new laws to cover the dust. Then they show this woman who’s brother died in an explosion saying, “OSHA is really the only one who can do anything.”

This is what frustrates me so much. People have decided that the government owes us everything. (We don’t have the right to pursue happiness anymore, we think we have the right to happiness and the government should make sure it happens!) OSHA isn’t the only one who can do anything.

Employees at factories can take responsibility to: bring any problems to the attention of the employers, clean up the mess around them, notify OSHA if their employers simply won’t do anything. Employers and Owners can check their own facilities and make sure they are safe. Good grief!

What will it take for people to wake up and take responsibility for themselves? let alone for safeguarding the liberties our forefathers worked so hard to provide and defend! If people were not looking to the government to provide everything for them, then a lot of the encroachment of government couldn’t happen.

Years ago I remember watching a 60 Minutes where they were talking about the tragedy of children being killed by people backing up their cars in their own driveways and the conclusion was that it was a tragedy, so everyone should take extra precautions. Walk around the back of your vehicle to get in. You know, tips to avoid a terrible tragedy. Now, when the story makes 60 Minutes, it’s all about who to blame. Car companies should be making the vehicles safer! The government should pass laws to make the car companies make the vehicles safer! There’s just this whole shift in the way Americans think.

I wonder what kind of difference we each could make by simply taking responsibility for ourselves and not looking for someone to blame. I wonder how things would change.

It’s so easy to get caught up in the pain of a broken relationship that moms and dads can so easily lose sight of what the children are going through. Most parents have no desire to cause their children pain, but sometimes we need some guidance in knowing how to keep from doing things that end up hurting our children.

Go here to read the article I wrote with step-by-step instructions on how to tell your children you’re getting a divorce.

Isn’t this what we all do? No matter what we’ve accomplished, no matter how many talents we have, how many things we do for our family and others around us and how many people have patted us on the back and said, “Good job!” we still wonder if we’re really good enough.

Kristin writes:

I’m always looking for the next class to take

the next book to read, the next calling

the next curve of the pen as you design who I’m meant to be in You

but this one is different, and the voices scream

I’m just not worthy, I’m just not good enough

There are so many things expected of us, and what if I don’t have what it takes?

Kristin goes on:

it just feels like adding another page to the list

that list that keeps everyone cared for and loved

and gives me a grade at the end of the course
“You don’t need to check a list to see if you’re a success as a wife and mother and woman of God. The lists were torn at Calvary. Lists are a way of whipping yourself for not being who you think you should be. You don’t need to try to prove to God that He made the right decision to sacrifice His son for You. He knows. You have two paths. You can choose to stay performance-oriented or you can choose to be loved. Burn your list.” Dr. Bob Laurent

Read all of Kristin’s post here.

Do you want to give your child a jump start on making the most of his education? to reach her full potential? Here are ideas for working with very young children (birth to five years).

Go here for the rest of the story.

Do you believe the Bible is the word of God? Do you accept that every word is true? It’s always a temptation to take the Bible and apply it to our lives the way we want to see it, but many are unaware of just how much they reinterpret.

What do you believe about the origin of life? The Bible says that God created life from nothing in six days. Many today are getting creative in interpreting that Scripture, completely unaware of what they’re doing.

Why do they do that? It probably began when certain scientists began hypothesizing about things evolving into something different and, not wanting to appear unintelligent, Christians tried to make those theories fit into the Bible.

The problem is those theories aren’t fact. There is no actual evidence that shows evolution to be a viable explanation of how life came into existence. The more scientists study the subject the more problems there are with the theory of evolution and the more surprising discoveries occur that actually fall right into what someone who believes the Genesis account of creation might expect.

Henry Morris wrote an excellent devotional/scientific commentary that details a number of interesting developments in the scientific community. If you’re looking for an exceptional devotional or a book study for your small group, check out The Genesis Record by Henry M. Morris.

Read familybuddy’s review of this book.

For further enlightenment, read The Case for Creation by Lee Strobel. It’s more current in its science.

How would we live differently if we believed that we were created by a loving God, in His image, in order to have a relationship with God rather than just happened to come into being by random chance for no particular reason?

There’s an email making the rounds that is a good reminder of just how powerful the smallest actions on our part can be. Sometimes we think that no one will really notice the little things we do, whether good or bad. But we may be noticed when we least expect it. (author unknown)

Several years ago a preacher from out-of-state accepted a call to a church in Houston, Texas. Some weeks after he arrived, he had an occasion to ride the bus from his home to the downtown area. When he sat down, he discovered that the driver had accidentally given him a quarter too much change.

As he considered what to do, he thought to himself, “You’d better give the quarter back. It would be wrong to keep it.” Then he thought, “Oh, forget it, it’s only a quarter. Who would worry about this little amount? Anyway, the bus company gets too much fare; they will never miss it. Accept it as a ‘gift from God’ and keep quiet.”

When his stop came, he paused momentarily at the door, and then he handed the quarter to the driver and said, “Here, you gave me too much change.”

The driver, with a smile, replied, “Aren’t you the new preacher in town?”

“Yes,” he replied.

“Well, I have been thinking a lot lately about going somewhere to worship. I just wanted to see what you would do if I gave you too much change. I’ll see you at church on Sunday.”

When the preacher stepped off of the bus, he literally grabbed the nearest light pole, held on, and said, “Oh God, I almost sold your Son for a quarter.”

Our lives are the only Bible some people will ever read. This is a really scary example of how much people watch us as Christian and will put us to the test! Always be on guard–and remember–you carry the name of Christ on your shoulders when you call yourself “Christian.”

• Watch your thoughts; they become words.
• Watch your words; they become actions.
• Watch your actions; they become habits.
• Watch your habits; they become character.
• Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.

God meets us where we are. He knows us intimately and knows what we need when we need it. Sometimes He personally sends us little messages of love and sometimes He uses others to send those messages. We all need to be aware of how God may be using us for little messages of hope. Following is a true story:

There is so much going on right now that life feels out of control. It’s scary, and I know I’m not placing my life in God’s hands like I should. I’ve never been very good with trusting God, especially with my life and future and the things I care about. I keep questioning: Does God care about this or that as much as I do?
I have to give a little back story before I share my praise/”smile” moment.
So, a few days ago, I was really struggling and really questioning whether God cared. Sounds pathetic right?
Anyway, I was talking with my mom about it and how I didn’t know what to do. I know I need to place my life in God’s hands, and yet I want to control my own life, in a way to try and ensure that I succeed in my hopes and dreams. Well, the conversation went on, and then I mentioned how butterflies are my way of seeing God in my life, like His little message from heaven sent to me. That He is still with me. Many times when I’ve had a hard day, I’m taking a walk and just at that moment a butterfly swoops down in my path and then flutters away.
So later that day, mom says “did you see what was on your desk?” and I’m like “no, what’s on it?” So I go look and there is a little yellow butterfly made out of wood and feathers on the end of a wire, standing up in my pen/pencil mug. She said she found it after our talk and knew God wanted me to have it.
Isn’t that neat?
So that is my praise moment. Even when I feel silly for believing God doesn’t care, God still takes the time to give me a little nudge. “See, Elizabeth,” He says, “I still care. I’m still here.”
So the little yellow butterfly sits on my desk, beside my computer… just a little reminder of God’s love.