Hello!, And welcome to my web page. This web site was designed
to aquaint you with free genealogy research on the internet. The first thing you
should do is gather together all of the information at your disposal,
photographs, certificates,( birth, marriage, death, DD-214 honorable discharge,
etc.) newspaper articles, and family oral traditions. Next start your basic
family tree and include all of the information you have, including notations,
(such as hobbies, family traditional stories, etc.) locations, and dates. Next,
download a free family tree / research software from the internet, such as
Legacy 4.0 at
http://www.legacyfamilytree.com/;
this is an excellant family tree maker with lots of room for notations,
photographs, etc. Transfer all of your notes and photos to Legacy.
Now, to start your research; you can begin either at your local public
library, the local hall of records, or the internet. The hall of records will
charge you $12.00 per copy of certificate. The other sources can be freely
researched. Your first search should be at
http://www.familysearch.org/Eng/Search/,
offered by the Mormon Church, this is not only free, but an excellant starting
point of your investigation into your heritage. Next, you might want to try
http://searches.rootsweb.com/, these
offer a search engine for names as well as a bulletin board for posting an
inquiry about an ancester or family ; I have received many hits from these
sources. You should also search for your family coat of arms
at
http://digiserve.com/heraldry/,
although not free, James Wolf heraldry is one of the oldest and best coat of
arms research sites. Other, non-orthodox sources of information include
http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/vocabularies/tgn/,
which is a search engine for geographic location names, such as "Shrum Lake",
"Shrum Creek", "Dark Shrum Branch", "Shrum Resevoir" etc. You can see that if a
family has been around awhile, and has had an influence on their neighbors and
surroundings, places are often named after them. You might
also try searching
http://www.google.com/,
etc. for your family name, you never know what you might find; such
as "Shrum", a song by Floyd Cramer. Google also has the ability to search the
internet for photographs. If you are searching, like myself,
for Indian heritage in your family tree, the search gets much more difficult.
Your ancester must be listed on the Dawes Rolls in order to be listed on the
tribal rolls. If you cannot find your ancester listed on the Dawes Rolls, you
must just accept the fact that you know you are from Indian blood, but can never
be officially recognized by either the tribe or the government as such. Many
Indian people of the 19th century were trying to fit in with the white nation
and changed their tribal names to white names, changed their Indian culture for
white culture, and refused to sign the rolls; in fact, less than one third of
the Indian nation were listed on the rolls. You can search the rolls at:
http://members.aol.com/bbbenge/front.html Military records are also an excellant sorce of information(
especially include notes on their battles if available); such as Pleasant
Franklin Shrum, who enlisted as a private, company I, 9th Kentucky Infantry,
C.S.A. on October 25th, 1861 in Columbia, Kentucky. He was discharged on
November 15th, 1864 at Louisville, Kentucky, after the end of the Civil War. He
returned home to find that his wife had died during childbirth, and that his son
had died during birth as well. You can search military records at:
http://home.att.net/~wee-monster/military.html Ship's logs from the Old World are also an excellant
source of information; such as the log from the "Davy" which sailed from
Rotterdam, Holland for America, and landed in Penn. on Oct. 25, 1738. The ship's
carpenter, William Patton had to bring the ravaged vessel into port, having lost
the captain, both mates, and 160 passengers at sea. Among the survivors,
(Johann) Jacob Schramm ( later Americanized into Shrum) and his two surviving
sons were among the 40 men who were well enough to take the oath of allegience.
(This year: 1738, had been so devastating to the German immigrants, that they
called it "The Year Of The Destroying Angels"; a reference to Psalms 78, verse
49: "He let loose on them his fierce anger, wrath, indignation, and distress; a
company of destroying angels." See
http://www.rootsweb.com/~fianna/oc/usa/narasl.html Lastly, develop a web page and publish your family tree; the
more people that know about your research, the better the chance for information
to come to you. You should really learn xhmtl and develop your own web page from
code, like this one; it's not as hard as it looks, and this being my first
effort, I think it looks better than what a "wysiwyg" editor can build. You can
visit:
http://webdesign.about.com/c/ec/9.htm
, to learn how to make your own web page. Remember, though, the
genealogy information you receive from the net is only as accurate as the person
who posted it. Always make notations of your sources for future reference, and
if in doubt, double check the source information from different areas.
Good luck with your search; Mel Shrum
I thank you for your visit to my web site. You may contact me here:
bravenet.com