Graveyards and cemeteries as sources of family history

Graveyards and cemeteries are a prime place to dig up more information. Visit the cemetery that you know your ancestors are buried in and look for other family members. It’s a good idea to take a record of the info from the tombstones. Taking a note of wider information that isn’t directly related to your blood line may still be useful later if you hit a family history dead-end, giving you another avenue of family history research. You may not get to visit this cemetery frequently or more than once so it pays to have it recorded. You could use a digital camera to save time recording family history information from the headstones.

Family history and surname searches

Check our family history surname directory for hundreds of thousands of common and some rare surnames. If you have a rarer surname in your ancestor line this can be a way of making rapid progress. With a less common surname you can make rapid progress in weeks, days or even hours. You can contact other family historians with the same surname through our site and collaborate on researching your family history

Organizing Family history by family member

Each family history life archive takes the place of the traditional family Group Sheet and is a very simple way to keep track of family members and family groups. Take the information that you receive on each ancestor or family member and and make a Family Group and family history entry on each person in your family. Start with yourself, then your parents and their children, your grandparents and their children. As you work back further in time you may contact relatives or other researchers to gather more family history content . Ask them to contribute to your family history research by sending them a family tree or family history archive invite and add any family material they have through arcalife collaborative tools

How obituaries help in gathering family history information

In your search for the family history, ‘cast your net wide’. Local newspaper offices or libraries can give you or get you copies of obituary notices which can give you multiple family history search leads. Obituary notices contain lots of useful information. If you are in any doubt, take a look at the Obits section of your local paper. In the older obituaries, longer write-ups are given on family members when they died telling about not only the person but about their life and in some cases about when their family line settled in a certain area of the country. Or you can Search the Obituary Collections at arcalife.com along side of more than a billion other family history records.