Did you know that all our presidents, with the exception of one, are related, either on their mother's side or their fathers, to King John Plantagenet, the signer of the Magna Carta? This is big news in part because a 12 year-old self-taught genealogist made it her goal to track the ancestry of all our presidents.
Family history research has become very popular of late with the PBS series, American Faces, that traces the family history of celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, YoYo Ma and Meryl Streep, and the NBC series Who Do You Think You Are.
I've been doing family history research since 1993 when I got the bug while doing research for an out-of-town friend at the Minnesota History Center when I lived in the Twin Cities. I got curious and dug out an old suitcase of my grandmother's genealogy research from the 1960s that became mine when she passed away in 1974.
Doing research in the 1960s and doing research in the era of the internet is worlds apart. I can go online and spend only a few hours on free websites any time of the day or night and come away with a gold mine of data. My grandmother spent years writing letters and waiting, sometimes for months for responses. I download digital files that I print in an instant while my grandmother received heavy photo paper copies of documents that in many cases were almost illegible.
My grandmother's goal was to apply for admittance to the Daughters of the American Revolution with her data and was turned down. She did not meet the standard of proof that the DAR insisted upon (see below).
One will find now days that what passes for genealogy research online at such sites at World Connect where family trees are shared through GEDCOM files, or on family name forums where researchers share information, that the research is all too often questionable-that is, lacking the proofs that are necessary. The gold standard for genealogists is that each researcher must reprove the connections of family members provided by other researcher. It is not enough to simply cite someone else's work, even when that work is well documents. It is important to track down all the sources. Genealogy research is not just a stroll in the woods, it is scaling the craggy face of a mountain.
Even with online resources it is important to do the leg work as well which may mean visiting the National Archives, state and regional research institutions, and enumerable city offices and archives, cemeteries and local libraries.
Besides the Minnesota History Center, I have visited the Minnesota Genealogical Society, the Regional Resource Center at Stout University in Menominee, the tremendous Family Search Library at Salt Lake City, the National Archives in Chicago and Anchorage, the Quaker Library in Guilford North Carolina, the genealogy center at the Newberry Library in Chicago, not to mention all the cemeteries, city halls and libraries.
Needless to say, I take every travel opportunity to do family history research. Unfortunately, there is never enough time at any one place to do a really exhaustive job. The work of the genealogist is never done!
On my father's mother's side we too are related to the Plantagenets according to a number of family trees I have located online. I am not willing to accept this as proof and I have not worked that far back on this particular line do to the proving I would need to do. I do use the information I get from every site I visit, whether proven or not, as clues to where to look for a new generations I am trying to locate or possible sources to investigate. These clues and sources are invaluable to the work of the genealogist.
For more information:
Presidents all related http://www.quora.com/Are-all-the-US-Presidents-related-to-each-other (Van Buren is the only president for whom she did not find a connection with King John.)
DAR standard of proof reprinted from their website http://www.dar.org/natsociety/content.cfm?ID=92&hd=n
You will need to provide proof for each date and place, for each generation, starting with yourself and going back lineally to your Patriot. In the first three generations, these proofs would consist of photocopies of birth, marriage, and death documents. For other generations back to the Patriot, one or more of the following items would usually be considered acceptable proof: cemetery records, tombstone inscriptions, obituaries, probate records, wills, census records, Bible records, local histories, and well-documented genealogies. Relationships between generations MUST be proven. Data submitted as proof is subject to DAR standards and interpretation.
Other standards of Proof links http://genealogy.about.com/cs/citing/a/proof.htm
