Book Description

How many of your great-grandparents can you name? What were their lives like? Are you curious to learn more? Start getting answers today with The Essential Guide to Unpuzzling Your Past. With wit and enthusiasm, Emily Croom provides the tools and information you need to begin your family history adventure, with step-by-step guidance, forms to copy, places to look, and interesting examples each step along the way. This is the must-have handbook to use when you start your genealogical detective work. Right away, you'll feel the excitement of your search. And chapter by chapter, you'll learn how to conduct it, from talking with people to making discoveries in public records. The Essential Guide to Unpuzzling Your Past makes your work easier, with interview formats, sample letters, illustrations, bibliographies and case studies. There are also tips for getting the most from names, dates and handwriting of the past. But that's not all. Moving far beyond any basic how-to format, this book does more than help you plan your genealogical search; it gives you hands-on experience by helping you organize what you find with more than 40 genealogical forms for searching, record-keeping, and presentation to your family. These include forms for abstracting indexes and records, forms for interviewing relatives, and a family group sheet with a convenient way of listing references. With The Essential Guide to Unpuzzling Your Past, you'll know where you are in your genealogical search, and you'll be able to decide what to do next. It's all here in the one book that helps you fit the pieces together to better understand your family!