Genealogy: The Search Is On

In the past, learning about your unique heritage meant asking your family members lots of questions.

But many of us may not have had that good fortune and, with few surviving relatives, had to depend on the limits of available resources. But not anymore. Thanks to the internet and websites like Ancestry.com, we can now sit at our laptops or use our smart phones to search thousands of records across the country in search of our own personal past.

Sometimes, however, that’s not quite enough. Enter local and regional genealogical societies, libraries, and archives where a remarkable amount of unique and hard-to-find documents are stored, catalogued, and digitized into searchable databases, allowing Texans an opportunity to search deeper into their lineage and heritage. Who doesn’t want to know where they came from? Places like the Franklin County Genealogical Society in Mount Vernon, the Carnegie History Center in Tyler, the Brazos Valley African American Museum in Bryan, and the Czech Heritage Museum and Genealogy Center in Temple are just a few among many repositories where the details of our collective and individualized histories are stored and made available. It’s great when you can just hit “search” but, like any good detective story, sometimes the search requires a little leg work too.