It seems simple to understand why history is important. There are countless times that history repeats itself. We are face with the same choices that we were just a handful of years ago. Did we learn from our mistakes or will we make the same ones over and over again?

Whether you believe in a Higher Power or not, there is still the question of what could have happened to those that are in your past. After all, don’t you want to know who was in your family tree? Could you be the descendant of one of the Kings or Queens of England? Perhaps you have an ancestor that was a war hero in the Revolutionary War.

Perhaps the past isn’t as pretty with ancestors that died in famines, illnesses or strife, only to save their children that you would eventually come from. The “what if” type questions are out there and people in general are curious about what it means for them. If you want to know what your chances of learning more about your past you have to give genealogy a chance. You have to try to learn more.

The good news is that it’s quite possible for many people to learn more about those in their family trees. The quest starts with understanding the process of genealogy and then learning how to get started on your own journey to learn as much as you can about those that have come before you in your family tree. Genealogy is the study of family ancestry.

It is the study and tracing of the family’s pedigrees. During the process of genealogy, you will collect the names of your relatives, including those that are deceased and will then establish their relationship to each other. This will include exploring various levels of your family tree as well including primary and secondary family members.

You will use both documentation and word of mouth to help you to develop your family tree. The goal is to ultimately build a family tree that includes all of your relatives as far back as you would like to take it, or at least as far as you can take it. Getting a family history of your family is a bit different. In genealogy, you technically only will get the names of your family members, creating a tree.

But, with a family history, you will take this one step farther by including information about each of those people. Learning more about the lives they lived is part of getting your family history. Sometimes, this can be done at the same time as creating a family tree, other times it is a bit more complex because of how difficult it can be to learn this information. The goal is to gather as much information about your ancestors as you can to better understand your family’s history in both public and private life.

Genealogy and history

One important thing to consider is the fact that your ancestry is part of history. Even if you can’t get through the search for your family as thoroughly as you would like to, chances are you will learn a great deal about history and the role that your family may have played in that history. It could be small but it could be something important or something significant.

Sometimes, a search for your family’s relatives can lead to reunions, or meetings with others that you may not have known or haven’t seen in years. When you explore this path, you may find that distant cousins can offer you information. Or, you may find that a fight in the family has led to a certain area of your family being cut off from you, and it may help to bring you all back together.

In addition to this, you may find that your family was separated for reasons that could not be controlled by them. For example, perhaps a war caused your family to split up. Or, foster home and adoption may have pushed your family into various directions that you didn’t know about.

The fact is; there are likely to be family secrets, hush memories and much more that you can uncover when you use genealogy as your tool to uncovering your family’s history and behaviors. Indeed, you are likely to bring your family closer together and to have a better understanding for each other. And, for many people this means piecing back together family traditions and revealing family secrets that should have been told long ago.

Genealogy is actually something that people have done for centuries, if not longer. The need to know about your past is a natural, human curiosity and for that there have been numerous different people that have strived to learn as much as they can about their past throughout history. Generally speaking, though, genealogy was something that was only done in olden times for those that were of power.

For example, it was important to trace the genealogy of nobles, kings, queens and emperors. Any ruler needed to have information that showed that he was the right ruler for the job. Genealogy was used to help determine who the righteous ruler in many cases was. If you wanted to claim that you had the right to have wealth and power, then you had to show that your ancestry proved that you were worth it.

Demonstrating that you were the rightful heir or the rightful ruler was no little task and only genealogy could make this happen. On a side note, the coat of arms of a family in the times of royalty where often used to help determine family lineage.

This is actually called heraldry. It is the ancestry of royalty that was used in the quartering of the coat of arms of a family. In many cases, though, modern ancestry studies have shown that many of those that used these methods to “claim” their righteous place in royalty where actually not authentic. They were merely fabrications that didn’t prove anything, really.

The most notable of these, of course, are those kings, emperors or other rulers that used their ancestry to show how they were linked to gods and the founders of the civilization itself. The fact is that genealogy is something that can only be traced through truth, and that is something that is in the eye of the beholder.

While you can probably find documentation to support more modern claims of ancestry, going back quite far in time is difficult. Nevertheless, it is a story that you can tell! Imagine begin able to say that your great, great, great grandfather was part of the Royal Family! The search for answers, then, will start with the need for authentic answers. For that, we turn to modern methods of uncovering the truth of families, first.

Excerpted from the book How To Uncover Your Genealogy by Wings Of Success.

This excerpt has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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