Tracing Your Family Tree

Tracing Your Family Tree - Where to Start

Birth, marriage and death are possibly the three most important events in a person’s life. These events are recorded in government vital statistics records, and these records are of great importance to a genealogy researcher. In fact, without these records, doing genealogical research would be next to impossible.

Here’s an example of how vital statistics can be used. In tracing your own family tree lets say you can go back as far as your great grandparents on each side of the family, but know nothing about their parents and can go no further with family records. By going to the court house and checking government vital statistics you can find the birth records of your grandparents, their marriage records, and their death records. With this information you can find information on their brothers and sisters, leading to other branches of the family. You can also find the names of their parents, your great, great grandparents. You can then find out where your great, great grandparents were born, showing the geographic trail as your ancestors moved. By checking their death records and lists of survivors you’ll find brothers and sisters, and children listed, showing other family branches again.

As an example, one man researching his family found that his grandfather had two brothers. His grandfather moved to Illinois, his brothers went first to Canada, and then to California. The brothers married and raised families in Canada, and some of the children married and stayed behind. Some went to California. It is now obvious that there are three branches of this family: Illinois, California and Canada. Vital statistics records provided the trail to follow. This record also showed that one member of the family was a military veteran of World War I. He was buried without a tombstone, so the family used vital statistics to prove his service and requested a tombstone from the Veterans Administration which was granted.

In California this researcher discovered birth records for long lost cousins he didn’t know he had, and by using these records he got in touch with other family members who were interested in genealogy, and was able to tie his research in with their research and go on from there. This led him to a branch of the family in New Zealand, a branch in Indiana, and a branch in Illinois that moved back and lived just a few blocks away from the researcher.

From a practical standpoint vital statistics are often the easiest records to find and the most reliable since they are kept by government agencies and recognized as being official documents. Many people say that they have no relatives, or have no living relatives. This is a misconception. Everyone has relatives. If you are alive then you are related to someone. Many people just don’t know who their relatives are. It becomes a question of identity, and how close or how distant relatives happen to be.

Using vital statistics can also allow a person to check on marriages. In past years many people would have more than one marriage, since mortality was so common. If a person’s spouse died, they usually remarried. Sometimes there would be children from the other marriage as well, leading to a larger family, with more records of birth, more records of death, and more records of marriages, again leading to more children and more records of birth. These records will in turn lead to more birth records, more marriage records and more death records, adding more and more names to the family tree list, and making a more complete picture.

Finding these vital statistics isn’t a secret. These are government records kept on file in court houses in counties across a state, and across the nation. In some areas the records are gradually being converted to digital form and may eventually be available online. Most however, still use the old method of microfilm storage which requires a person to go physically to a location and look up the information in person.

The record of death, the record of birth, and the record of marriages in government vital statistics are an important tool for the genealogical researcher, a tool that many have learned to use to great benefit. The next time you need to find out information about an ancestor, perhaps checking the vital statistics would be a good place to start.

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