Law and Family History

So, as I am slowly delving farther into my family history major, I am learning more and more interesting things (which I hope to be able to share with you). Well, I'm taking a class this semester called Family and Law in American History. Basically it is a family history class where we learn the law behind the family history research we are doing. Learning about the laws and government of the area where you are researching is very important with family history work. While you don't have to know the mundane details, it is important to know the general ideas about what government records were recorded when, and what the laws were behind these records. Understanding this will not only help you understand records like censuses, birth certificates, wills, etc., but will also help you understand where to even start your research and where to not research. For example, if you know your relative was born sometime around 1780 and the area where you are recording didn't start records for birth until 1850 then you know not to look for a birth certificate in that area. Make sense? Well, I hope it does, and I hope all goes well in your research this week.

Family Search

A good website to use is familysearch.org. This is a website sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They have spent a good deal of money to gather records and to begin to get them indexed and online so that they can be searched. That is why volunteer indexing is so important. This website it not only a great searching website, but they also have a great website with current news on family history. The website is wiki.familysearch.org. This can be quite a useful tool to find information about areas where families may have lived.
Another useful tab is the learn tab. It contains lots of videos about family history tools and guides. The videos can be searched by level of skill, area of family history, or language. This can be an extremely useful tool because all of our family history is different and unique for each person, and there are a wide variety of videos.
Also the books tab is interesting. It contains a link that takes it to BYU archives. They have scanned lots of family history related books and created a site for searching the scanned books and then you can search in the scanned books for names or other keywords.
These are just a few of the tools on this website. I would encourage you to go look at it and explore it. This website has a lot of great tools, and can be just as useful as ancestry.com. Good luck with your family history.