Reinforcing Your Culture

March 20, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Culture is a way of living and it’s how most people survive in life. Not only does our culture reinforce everyone’s belief about behavior, but it also reinforces our assumptions about what is considered acceptable and unacceptable behavior. Culture also brings out moral and social codes when it comes to society, which currently exists in the rules and laws we abide by.

Culture helps the way people act, speak, do their business and even how they view their life. There are different reasons why reinforcing your culture is important when it comes to the behavior of your family.

Many people might not realize this but your culture plays a huge part in the behavior and psychological pattern in a person. Culture is a way to define who we are and why people behave the way they do.

Our Culture defines the main characteristics to important events or even ideas in our lives. For instance, when a culture enforces greed, those in the corporate world will do any “get rich quick” scheme or do whatever is necessary to climb the corporate ladder. Greed is even reinforced by various images of wealth and various messages about what each person could gain from having a huge piece of the pie.

There are so many subcultures within a culture. For example there’s Hispanic-American and African-American. When it comes to reinforcing culture within each of the groups, they’re being taught your literature, music, photos and family structure. For example, for the Hispanic-American subculture, they’ll use images of Latin dancing moving to the sound of salsa or show that in a film.

It’s important to always try to reinforce your culture to your family. Culture plays a huge part in on how people become the way that they are. How your raise your children by reinforcing culture can make a huge impact for how they turn out later down the road.

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Genealogy and Hunting Down Ancestors

March 7, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Digging deep into your family history using genealogy can be such a fun task with many rewards at the end.

By doing some research online, checking out your local library and historical societies, you should have no problems digging up some information about your family’s history. See how far back you can go and what information you uncover… it’s fascinating.

The census data will have information dating back from 1790 all the way up to 1930. It’s pretty amazing what you can find. The only set back is, no information from the last 72 years is available to the public to get a hold of. What can be found on the census data include the names of your family member, age, where they were born, the year they immigrated, they’re jobs, any crops they grew and whether or not they were married.

If your relative was in the military, records are available from the National Archives that date all the way back to 1912 and the Revolutionary War. Anything after 1912 will be at the National Military Personnel Records Center. You will need to know when they were in the service, what branch, and which war they were in.

If your family were immigrants than the U.S. will have records of them arriving to the United States between 1820 and 1982. This information will state what country your relative is from, where they were born, what shit they were on, what they looked like and how much money was on them upon arriving to the U.S. It should also list the names and address of where they were staying.

Finding information on your ancestors is such an amazing experience that should be done. This is your time to find out where you family came from and what they did with their lives. It might be a long task, but it will be a rewarding one.

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Using Newspapers to Uncover Your Genealogy

January 15, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Newspapers seem like a much harder way to uncover hard facts about your ancestors. Historical records are generally much easier to search for hard-and-fast facts, but newspapers can fill in incredible details about your ancestors that the straightforward records can’t. If you’re lucky enough to find a newspaper or periodical article about your ancestors, you won’t just have facts; instead, you’ll have a story.

The first newspaper in the United States was the Boston Newsletter in 1704 and newspapers have remained an important American institution ever since. Early newspapers were full of names, such as the names of indentured servants, apprentices, or runaway slaves (and the resultant rewards for catching one). Court reports, biographies, or estate articles may also reveal information about your ancestors.

Searching Historical Newspapers

Popular genealogy site Ancestry.com boasts the largest database of historical newspapers on the Web. They’ve collected newspapers from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The earliest newspapers are from as far back as the 1786. Users are able to print out articles from newspapers since each newspaper page is recorded as a digital image. This setup makes great fodder for scrapbookers. Ancestry.com provides indexes for each issue. The website has even set the impressive goal of adding 1,000 new newspaper pages every day, so check back if you can’t find anything. If you’re looking for information on what was going on in your ancestor’s time, look at issues of the local paper. If you know your ancestor’s birth, marriage, or death date, you can use this information to find the paper from that day and search it for announcements. These announcements may also provide colorful details about your ancestor’s birth, death, or marriage that official records won’t. As an added benefit, Ancestry.com uses “optical character recognition” which can recognize text within digital images. Unfortunately, this depends on the quality of the paper and the image.

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How to Search Genealogy Through Immigration Records

January 13, 2011 by Leave a Comment

When constructing your family tree, you may frequently run into proverbial brick walls in your historical document information search. Many times this means you’ve discovered when your family immigrated to the United States. This doesn’t mean it’s the end of the road in your search, however; rather, it means it’s time to start searching immigration records. Immigration records are generally available in either passenger lists or naturalization records.

Passenger Lists

As of 1819, it was required by law that ship captains keep track of any passengers coming into the United States via foreign ports. Congress passed legislation that made ships hand in a list of passengers whenever the ship arrived in port. Most immigration records are comprised of such passenger lists. While earlier passenger lists provide only bare bone essentials (names, etc.), later lists became more and more detailed. Expect to find details like passenger’s names, ages, home countries, occupation, and intended destination within America. Passenger lists also included the ship’s name, the type of the ship, and details of the ship’s voyage.

Naturalization Records

These records started in 1906 with the Basic Naturalization Act. “Naturalization” is the process aliens must go through in order to become a legal citizen of a country. Every country’s process is different. In the United States, the US Bureau of Immigration handled all early naturalization forms until it became the Immigration and Naturalization Service. If any of your ancestors wanted to become citizens, they had to file a “declaration of intention” stating they intended to become a United States citizen and had no further ties with their old government or country. After five years, the immigrant could officially begin the process towards citizenship. If you uncover naturalization records for your ancestors, you’ll probably learn the applicant’s name, birth date, birth place, departure port and date, arrival port and date, last address in their home country, court location, filing date, and a physical description of the applicant.

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