It’s easy to research your roots

With DNA testing and vast troves of historical records online, looking into your roots has never been easier.

Start by interviewing family members for information, especially the older ones. Nothing can beat firsthand recollection and lore handed down from the past to get a true sense of your ancestors.

With just a few names, you can start fleshing out the family tree.

Larger city libraries usually have genealogical sections, with birth, death, tax and census records. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has the largest genealogical library in the world in Salt Lake City, with more than 4,500 branches, called Family History Centers, worldwide. These facilities are open to the general public for research, as is their website, familysearch.org.

For-profit genealogical websites also enable you to look through millions of documents from around the world. The largest, ancestry.com, charges for a basic monthly subscription and offers more than 4 billion records, according to company spokesman Mike Ward. The website has transcribed all U.S. censuses from 1790 to 1930, and the raw records can be found there. It also has passenger lists of ships arriving in America, old phone books, immigration records, draft cards, high school yearbooks, birth, death and marriage certificates and more.

“You used to have to scroll reel to reel through microfilm at a library to find that one ancestor,” said Ward. “Now you can type an ancestor’s name and within minutes find a document written 100 years ago.”

Family DNA projects, which also help connect people, can be found on websites like familytreedna.com.

Of course, nothing compares with traveling to the places your ancestors lived, looking for records in courthouses, libraries, churches and historical societies and soaking up the atmosphere — visiting the old brick church they attended, casting a line in the creek they fished, reading their epitaphs on old tombstones.

— Joe Mozingo