In A Chance in the World, this year’s One Book, Steve Pemberton recounts his history as an orphan in the foster care system. Untethered from any roots, he conducted a search for his birth family and located his grandparents and all four of his siblings, who had been fostered with different families. The experience was part of a long effort to reconcile his personal identity.
Most of us don’t face nearly the same challenge in identifying our family, but even so, how many of us can go much further back than our great-grandparents? Genealogy is the search for our roots, building a family tree of names, dates, and history that shaped how we came into this world. And it can be a fascinating process, as the popularity of television shows like Finding Your Roots and Who Do You Think You Are? attest. But there are plenty of tools available for anyone interested in exploring their family’s past.
IU East subscribes to HeritageQuest, a genealogy database that includes census records, city directories, veteran records, and tens of thousands of genealogical ebooks to get you started. Other tools include the National Archives and Records Administration, whose website indexes their extensive collection (some of which can be ordered on microfilm). Locally, Morrisson-Reeves Public Library offers loads of books and microfilm relating to Indiana (and to a lesser extent, Ohio) families and history. One complication of genealogical research is that many things of interest are not online, requiring visits to local libraries and museums where ancestors lived.
However, there is still a lot that can be found on the internet. Of course, there are a number of for-pay sites, like Ancestry.com, RootsWeb, or FamilySearch, although most of these also have a free area. These websites and thousands of others are listed on Cyndi’s List of genealogy sites on the Internet, which has indexed and cross-referenced them for ease of use. We also have a LibGuide to help get you started.
Interested in searching for your family’s history? Ask us at iueref@iue.edu if you need help!