Day 4

New day, new generation.  What do you know about your maternal grandparents?  Your mother's parents.  Do you know their full names?  Do you know your grandmothers maiden name?  Do you know where & when they born? Do you know the full names and dates & places of birth of their children, your aunts & uncles.   These questions are usually not easy answer just of the top of your head.  They may take some digging.  Don't be surprised if your mom don't know all the answers either.  If you are lucky enough to still have your grandparents around, interview them.  Make sure you tape it.  It will be a wonderful thing to have to look back on.  When loved ones are gone, it's amazing how much we wish we had taken the time to get to know them, photograph them, just to share with our own children.  Beside the best information is from the source itself.  Start a new page for each grand parent in your journal.

Also, now is a good time to starting looking at the different types of charts that you can use to map our your journey through time. 

A pedigree chart is  a type of chart where you track your ancestors.  You use it to track usually 5 generations, their names, dates & places of birth, marriage, & death.  You will number each chart as a page, then when you get to the last person on the line you should write the page number of the chart where the line continues.

Then there are family group sheets.  A family group sheet is where you keep track of a family and their basic information.  You have the mother & father and children.  It will ask for dates & places of birth, marriage, deaths.  It will usually ask for the names of the children's grandparents.  Depending on the type of family group sheet it may ask baptism information,

One of my favorite and free internet sites to use is https://www.familysearch.org/  It is run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  It's a good source of information to find others working on the same trees.  Their collection in mostly user based.  Example I send them all the group sheets & pedigree charts I have put together on my tree and they publish them.  But they do offer information from free sources such as the 1880 census.  They greatly improved their site over the years.  They have indexing projects, free mini classes, links to other websites and software.

Please feel free to share what you have learned and found.  Introduce yourself to each other.