PolkMoms.com

Shawn has mentioned being a big geneaology buff. A fellow homeschooling mother with a 10 year old daughter she takes with her recently mentioned that she pairs genealogy with history instruction.

Here were some of her tips:

"She does come along when we go to the archives research department or cemetary hunts. She has become fascinated with old cemetaries. Usually the way that I work it for her is that we will have one line that we work on. We start with looking for census records, other family members that have info and such. With each person that we enter into our lineage we search for stories, diary entries and such. Many families share this info. Our records are maintained in two places, on ancestry.com and on paper in file boxes. The photos from cemetaries and old family photos are maintained in document boxes. Each person in our lineage has information that goes with them even if it seems trivial. She will type up the information on the person, the time period in history, what was going on in that time period, important historical dates in that person's life. This goes into our permanent file and so this is her documentation. When we pick a particular time in history to study then she pulls all of the information that she has learned through the genealogy and can tie it into a period in history. The way that our tree is set up on ancestry.com it is pretty easy for us to pick out a historical time period based on dates of people. Genealogy is addictive and can be extraordinarily time consuming. However, the computer has made it much easier to do most of your research so it saves legwork. Here are three places to get you started www.ancestry.com and www.genealogy.com and www.rootsweb.com . Ancestry has millions of records in their database and they have a great format to store the info you have gathered. Genealogy you can search family pages by typing in the last name. I have found cousins I didn't know I had this way and even a family reunion with second, third and fourth cousins that was less than an hour away. I think rootsweb has family pages also or I have it mixed up with genealogy. Ancestry does cost money to research. I think you get limited access free for two weeks. Limited access is US records only, not worldwide records. After that you can subscribe monthly, quarterly, or yearly. It is worth the money if you are really interested in continuing your research. Oh, if you decide not to subscribe to ancestry they will store what you already have for free and you can access it anytime. I hope this answers all of your questions, let me know if I can answer anymore. God Bless and happy hunting."

I thought this would be great. Shawn how does it work when you go to the records place in Bartow?

I love this lady's ideas! I have always said as a history lover, "what history is better than your own?"

I agree, a subscription to ancestry.com was priceless to me. I found out information that I would have never found with out it.

My subscription has lapsed but I plan on getting it again when my little ones are older and I have time to really dig deep again.

The Polk County Historical Library has a subscription to Ancestry.com that is FREE to use while at the library. How cool is that?

This is where you should go to do research. The library is the old Polk County courthouse.