Site last updated: 12 Feb 2012

  John Seymour 2011

Getting started...

Genealogy isn’t all about names and dates. There is a real personal side to it, if you look past official records and read published histories that include information about your ancestors and the lives they led.

I recently found a treasure trove of information about one ancestor, Alexander Seymur, who had previously been a bit of a dead end. I didn’t know much about this great, great grandfather of mine, despite having spent time with my local library many times in my life. But online searches, both at Ancestry.com and in Google Books, revealed many clues. I learned more about his family and how he spent his life.

I highly recommend researching your family history both with Google books, and on Ancestry.com. I found plenty of information in both locations, and interestingly, there was little to no overlap in my search results from the two places. Google Books was very helpful with research such as this. They have excellent search capabilities, and if the book is public domain, you can just save the whole thing to your bookshelf. You can perform additional searches on the books.

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   gnes May Day is my paternal grandmother. I have inserted her picture from her wedding photo that I got from my Aunt Elsie Labon from Detroit some time ago. I then inserted a census record from 1920. Doing research and making those finds on sites like Ancestry.com can be both rewarding and exciting. I never knew my grandmother as she died when my dad was very young.

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   y son Matthew is a huge Star Wars fan. Genealogy is a hobby for me. So I got a laugh out of this image that I found on the internet. I just had to post this toon on my site.

When Matthew was younger, he would fall asleep watching these movies and after a short time could recite the entire dialog for every character when he would watch the movies again. Now that he is older I bet he couldn't do it today. What am I saying; I couldn't do that if I wanted to. Kids do the darndest things. LOL

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   ncestry.com is also fantastic for researching written histories. Their document interface doesn’t have quite as many ways to search as Google does, but if you’re doing research on Ancestry.com, chances are you have a family tree on the site. (And if you don’t, you should start one. It’s free!) Any histories you find you can attach to the records of those on your family tree that are mentioned in the histories. Then you won’t ever have to go looking for the information again. Another nice thing about attaching any reference material to a person on Ancestry.com is that their system pulls out facts from the resource, whether it is a census record, a passport application, or a published history, and asks you if you want to add it to the person’s record. If you do this enough times with enough records, you can get a run down of where your ancestors spent their lives, when they traveled, from where they emigrated, all on one page.

While the published histories that I have found have only led me so far to Alexander Seymour and his wife Ida Segur, they have painted a picture of a man that I never knew, that died long before my parents were even born. And that is more valuable to me than just another name or date.

The next time you call or visit your parents, grandparents, aunts, or uncles, ask them to tell you about something they remember from their past, or anything they remember about other ancestors. They will have knowledge and impressions that will be important to your family history down the line. Once someone dies, their memories go with them.

To know your ancestors’ stories is to know where you come from, where your roots lie. For this particular branch of my family tree, my roots are firmly planted in New Jersey.