Genealogy

Join me as I find out more about my family tree and try to tell the stories of my great-grandparents.

Why Study Our Ancestors’ Past?

I never had a desire to study my ancestors until I did an internship at the Zhang Legacy Collections Center. During the internship I created several finding aids for the collections I worked with. I was amazed by the amount of information I could find using ancestry.com, old newspapers, and city guides to synthesize into a brief biography.

After the internship was over and I started looking for full-time work, I thought I would start researching people in my family that I knew very little about to keep my research skills fresh. I started out strong, then got busy at work and was too tired to think about getting back on the computer to do research so my projects stalled. A couple weeks ago I got back into doing the research and the excitement has drawn me in again. Hopefully by creating this page I can keep that excitement going and spread it to others.

Starting Your Journey

It can be overwhelming to see how many hits an ancestry.com search generates, but most of them are not valid. That is where filters come in handy. Just looking at a segment of the results helps the mind focus.