Resources for Family Research - Honors 380 - Writing Your Heritage

Questions to Consider...

How did family members in the diaspora uphold their traditions?

Which of these traditions survive today?

Are there traditions that your parents or grandparents tried to keep that are not being upheld by your generation?

How do Americans reconnect with lost cultural traditions?

Can the Internet help diasporic communities connect with the culture in their homeland?

Did your cultural group assimilate easily? Which traditions did they maintain? How were these maintained? Are there movements to try and reclaim some of these traditions?

What factors have influenced your own cultural identity? How has your cultural identity changed since the time of your grandparents, or your great-grandparents?

Who is the custodian of culture in your family?

Whose cultural traditions are stronger, your mother's or your father's? Why?

What was the mood in the United States toward your heritage group at the time of their immigration? What prejudices did they have to face?

How has this situation changed since their immigration?

How is traditional culture preserved and manifested in your ancestral country today?

Are you familiar with today's pop culture in your ancestral country?

Online Resources

FamilySearch
Through this website The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints also offers access to genealogical resources, online classes and instructional videos.
Immigrant Ships
The website of the Immigrant Ships Transcriber's Guild (ISTG). You can search their database using the link at the top left of the page to locate passenger lists containing your family name.
Free BMD
Access to some birth, marriage, and death records from England and Wales.
United States Geneaology
The USGenWeb Project is made possible through the work of volunteers to identify free genealogy websites for research in every county and every state of the United States. Your searches will be most effective if you know the state and country where the relative you are researching settled.
RootsWeb
Ancestry.com user-contributed site providing for sharing geneaological information. Also provides some access to census records and vital statistics.
Ellis Island Foundation
The Ellis Island foundation oversees the American Family Immigration History Center, a resource of over 25 million arrival records from over 900 ships.
We Relate.org
A geneaology wiki sponsored by the Foundation for On-Line Genealogy and the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana. To get the most out of this site, you will have to register.
Immigrant Ancestors Project
A project sponsored by Brigham Young University's Center for Family History and Genealogy. To create the database, images of emigrant records are transmitted over the Web to volunteers who extract their contents and send them back to the project team at Brigham Young University. (BYU). BYU students are hired as part of the project team to supervise the volunteers and edit their work before adding it to the database.
Scotland's People
Birth, marriage and death indexes for Scotland and digitized images of many of the certificates and census returns for Scotland.
Mocavo.com
Mocavo is a search engine for ancestry-related information Basic searches can be performed for free, however Mocavo also offers an expanded fee-based service.

Cemetery Projects

Billion Graves
CanadaGenWeb's Cemetery Project
A volunteer-built database, the Cemetery Project currently offers a free and searchable listing of over 18,000 known Canadian cemeteries.
Find a Grave - World Vital Records

Libraries

Honors 380 - Writing Your Heritage: Resources for Family Research

Questions to Consider...

Online Resources

Cemetery Projects

Genealogical Societies