We are seeing an unprecedented assault on American history from the left. The goal is to weaken children's bond to our country, so that they will accept nefarious changes leading to the surrender of our national identity, so that we willingly join a One World Socialist Government.
One way to prevent this is to help children find their roots in America. People feel a stronger connection to history when they know that history is not just events that happened long ago, to people, they never met, but events that their grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins lived through, influenced and were influenced by. History comes alive when it's personally connected to you.
I think we have a civic duty to help the children we have and interact with to discover their place in American history. Genealogy is an excellent tool for doing this.
The most complete and easy to use genealogy site I have found is
www.familysearch.orgIt's free to set up an account and they never try to sell you anything. Family Search has many millions of scanned documents including census records, church records, birth records, death records, deeds, wills, military pay records, veteran pay records and more. Most records are American, European, Canadian or Australian, but there are huge amounts of records from elsewhere. Most people's family lines already have the work done on them. You can use the family information you have and look for matching names, birth places, birth dates, death dates, children and life events to accurately add yourself, if your line is not already attached to you.
If you don't have an immediate connection, once you set up an account, on the right side of your screen, there should be 3 small, horizontal lines. Click them. The second option down from your name will be "search". Click it. The first option will be "records". Click it.
That will open up a new page. On that page, in the boxes provided, enter the first and last name of an ancestor you know, a location they had a connection to, such as birthplace, place of death, place of burial, or where they lived and the year they were born or died. Approximate years are close enough. Then click search.
This will pull up records that are a full to partial match. Then look at the records to see if they are the person you are looking for. Many records will have a portrait of the ancestor or an avatar, with their birth and death dates, if known and 7 digit code, made of letters and or numbers. You can add that person to your pedigree. Everyone else they are descended from will be added at the same time, in some cases, back as far as Adam.
Most families used the same first names over and over, across generations, so you need to check you are choosing the right person by matching all the data you are sure of. Spellings of surnames change over generations, but other data can still be matched.
If the person pulled up doesn't have a 7 digit code, you can often use the information provided to move up the generations to someone who is in the system.
Family Search allows you to update family trees if you can document the connections.
If you are related to anyone famous and many people are, professional genealogists have likely done the work for you.
Cross referencing your ancestors, on other websites can give you much more information on them. There are an amazing number of first hand accounts from the 1600's on online on early American settlers.
ancestors.
www.findagrave.com is very useful. They show actual gravestones and have life details on most of the people buried.
www.geneanet.org is decent.
www.geni.com is decent too.
www.wikipedia.org has articles on many people and the citations at the end of the articles often lead to much more information.
www.wikitree.com is another good source for information.
One thing you will find is that a good deal of the people you deal with daily are cousins of yours. It's another good reason to treat other people decently.
If you have any questions, please feel free to ask and I'll help you if I can.
Keith
