An ancestry search can be a both fun and exciting way to discover all kinds of things about who you are and where you come from. By looking into your geneology, you can uderstand more about your family and where they come from, and ancestry searches are a good way to show your relatives that you care about the consanguineous people in your life. Besides that, an ancestry search can settle many unknown and unanswered questions about who you are and where you come from.

I first got the idea of an acestry search from a simple question from my younger son. "Father," he asked, "how did our family get over here?" In my family, it doesn't take an ancestry search to answer certain basic questions about our geneology. Everyone knows about Grandma Milton, and her epic struggle to get over the border despite having no money. She eventually went across the sea as a stowaway on the S.S. Martha, barely surviving weeks of sickness and near starvation. And everyone knows that she married a sailor, and that they later got rich through the maritime trade and the plentiful fishing in those days. But no one knows much about that sailor, besides his name. Where did he come from? We did an ancestry search to find out.

The ancestry search initially yielded very little information, and we had to pay big bucks for a more comprehensive search before we had anything to go on at all. But soon we had a family tree, and found out that Grandpa Sal, as he was known, came from Wales. We even had several generations of his family roots in the old country, but that is all that the ancestry search told us. To get the real answers, we decided to go to Wales and research it ourselves.

One thing about internet ancestry searches is that they can't do everything. Your ancestry search is only as good as the information available online. Much of the information is simply not currently available to ancestry searches. To do a proper ancestry search if it is very important to you to know just where you came from (as it is important to me), you might just have to go to the country and look for records yourself. We are currently pursuing our own ancestry search the old fashioned way – perusing town records for clues about the life of our ancestor. So far, our ancestry search has yielded some interesting results, but it is far from over.