Don't post living peoples' personal info.

r/Genealogy Researchers Genealogy Resources If you are looking for specific help on a specific region, this post has a list of people willing to help with searches and lookups regarding certain areas. I think that’s similar to what we’re trying to do as writers too-giving meaning to our experiences, and hopefully leaving something for those who come after us.A subreddit about all things genealogy. Genealogy is a personal way of making sense of history, of figuring out where you fit in the order of things. Why was her nickname “Kush,” according to the print next to her name? I’ll never quite know, but I’m glad I know it anyway. But it’s crazy to find a picture of your grandmother at age seventeen simply because someone at some point decided to scan every page of a 1941 yearbook from a small town in Pennsylvania.

(My new book, The Stories You Tell, deals a lot with this very issue.) But until you really dig in to see what’s out there, it’s hard to grasp the scale of it. There’s so much information available online. I probably seemed like a crazy person the few times I sat at a coffee shop working on this stuff, saying names out loud and trying to guess at new spellings based on how it sounds. Even though the internet age has made this type of research infinitely more accessible, it can be tricky when searching digitized records since you don’t necessarily know how it’s spelled. It makes tracking down certain details a challenge. As for his surname-it’s got three different spellings on his death certificate alone. Various documents also spell it as Wasil, Wasel, and Vosel. For example, my paternal grandmother’s father (my great-grandfather) went by Joe, but his Polish given name was Vasil. It’s also been quite interesting to see how details get altered over time. The concrete details may be scant, but they sketch out a picture that we writers can use to fill in some blanks. This inconsistent spelling here-is it because an impatient clerk misheard it, or maybe the distant relative in question didn’t know how to write. A marriage license tells a whole story in a few short lines. A series of documents becomes a narrative. Joking aside, obviously anyone with an interest and an internet connection can get started, but I really think that the storytellers among us thrive here. We don’t mind spending tons of time on something no one else may ever look at.We think abstractly, which can lead to unusual connections.We’re good with details (such as comparing vital statistics in order to determine if this Mary Smith is related to our Mary Smith).We like research-the less interesting it could possibly seem to anyone else, the better.

Writers are well-suited to genealogy research for a few reasons:

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