Learning About Your Ancestors
where to find their stories
Talk to your Family
It's amazing what people know, but don't share. When I started asking I ended up with journals, letters, and some incredibly stories. Even if family members don't have a lot of information they may have bits and pieces that will lead you elsewhere!
Cyndi's List
>State
>obituaries, peoples & families, newspapers, occupations, photographs & memories, societies & groups
Local Libraries
If you still live in the area where your ancestor lived, or can visit the area where they lived be sure to visit the local library there. They will often have newspaper archives, local histories, and family histories.
Family Search Wiki
Use this to find biographical sources specific to a particular area.
>Oregon
>Biographies
Family History Books
Family History Books is a collection of more than 40,000 digitized genealogy and family history publications from the archives of some of the most important family history libraries in the world. The collection includes family histories, county and local histories, genealogy magazines and how-to books, gazetteers, and medieval histories and pedigrees.
Family Search Wiki -
Tracing LDS Ancestors
Use this web page to find potential sources of biographical information.
CLICK ON
https://www.familysearch.org/learn/wiki/en/Tracing_LDS_Ancestors
LDS Family History Suite 2
A rich resource for Mormon Pioneer biographical information on CD ROM
LDS Family History Suite 2
Some of these resources are now searchable individually online in various places.
The entire database is available to search on Ancestry.com with a paid subscription, however, you can not limit your search to LDS FHS 2.
It is available to search in the Family History Center.
Early Church Information File
An alphabetical index of individuals. It occupies 75 rolls of microfilm. (FHL films 1,750,655 to 1,750,729]) and contains about 1,500,000 entries from over 1,200 sources about Latter-day Saints and their neighbors. The index is international in scope and should be among the first sources checked when searching for Latter-day Saint ancestors or persons living in areas heavily populated by Latter-day Saints. It mainly covers sources from 1830 to the mid-1900s.
Trails of Hope: Overland Diaries and Letters, 1846-1869
A portion of BYU's extensive collection of Mormon Pioneer diaries and letters, digitized, transcribed and searchable.
One of the few sources that will permit you to see your ancestors' handwriting.
Pioneer: Utah’s Online Library
An all-in-one portal for all of Utah’s libraries with large digitized material.
Find digital resources of historical significance from a variety of digital collections in Utah. Some of the collections material is rare, hard-to-find and may be unavailable anywhere else. You can find digitized photographs, manuscripts texts, maps, audio & video recordings, transcripts, books, yearbooks, newspapers, theses and dissertations, and digital exhibits, as well as "born digital" items.
Mormon Pioneer Overland Travel, 1847–1868
If you can not find information specific to your ancestor, you may be able to learn about their experience by reading accounts of pioneers traveling in the same company.
The database is a compilation of names obtained from rosters and other reliable sources of individuals that traveled on the pioneer trail during this 22 year time period. Where possible, a bibliography containing diaries, journals, letters, and reminiscences written by company members or contemporary reports about the company is also listed.
http://www.lds.org/churchhistory/library/pioneercompanysearch/1,15773,3966-1,00.html
The Pioneer Story
"The trail from Nauvoo, Illinois, to the Great Salt Lake Valley was approximately 1,300 miles long and would ultimately lead 70,000 pioneers of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to the West. Take the journey with them. Stop along the trail and read their own accounts of what happened."
A wonderful site to learn more about what the Pioneer experience was.