Monday, December 26, 2011

Advice - 52 Weeks of Personal Genealogy & History - Week #52

Week #52 – Advice. Do you have any advice for future generations who may be researching your family? For example, was there a name change or a significant relocation in your past? This is intended to be a very flexible question. Answer it any way you wish.

Hopefully, my research will be handed down in some way so that future researchers will have a head start. One bit of advice is to use the message boards and blogs to make contacts with others researching the same families. One of the most fun and rewarding parts of researching my family has been finding others that are interested in the same families or surnames. Be careful sharing information on the living though as once it leaves your hands you can't control how much of it is published.

Watch out for different spellings of names even within the same family and don't assume that those that spell the name the same are related. While this applies to any surname, I have found my Rohrer family especially difficult to trace due to different spellings. I finally had a breakthrough by searching on one of the more unusual first names and found the name spelled "Rear"!

One surname with an interesting twist is my Pulskamp family. Their surname was originally Krampe, but as owners of the Pulskamp farm in Germany, they took the name Pulskamp. The farm in Germany eventually passed to Bernhard Brüwer/Brewer who then took the Pulskamp name. My Pulskamp family kept the name when they came to the US.

My final piece of advice would be to not just collect names, but to find out more about the individuals behind the names. That's what makes the research truly interesting. Well, hard to believe that this concludes the 52 Weeks prompts! On to 2012!

This a weekly challenge from GeneaBloggers called 52 weeks of personal genealogy history.

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