How I did it: My mother was adopted but always wanted to know as much as she could about her other family, the one she belonged to by blood, so had already done some research on her own. I took that research and expanded on it with help from historical documents I found on the web and sites like Ancestry.com, which allowed me to build a whole family tree around just a handful of names and dates. I'm still learning more and more, still adding on to my tree, still learning about my ancestors and who they truly were, not just who their parents were and what their names were.

Lessons & tips: When you reach a dead-end with your research, try another route. Scour documents, libraries, letters, and anything you can get your hands on. Once you've found even the smallest thing to go on, run with it. But don't assume that everything you find will be correct. Do your research and double-check your sources. Ancestry.com can be extremely helpful, but nothing's perfect, and it will occasionally be wrong, so keep an eye out for anything that seems out of place.

Resources: Ancestry.com and various historical sites around the web are what helped me out the most after I couldn't go much farther with the letters, documents, and little things my family had already collected.

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Aug 09, 2009, 06:04PM PDT | 0 comments | 1 cheer