Genealogy Search: Birth Records Are A Good Starting-Off Point
The best place to begin a genealogy search is to go through the birth records because there is plenty of information available in these records that can prove to be very valuable when tracing someone's ancestry. In fact, whenever you hit the wall when performing genealogy search you will find that it is birth records that will come to your rescue as they will help you to get underway once more and from them you can find useful information such as a person's full name and their precise date of birth including the time, date and they will also provide the full name of the parents as well.
Birth records also contain the social security of the parents as well as their address when their child was born, their occupation and other useful information, all of which can make your genealogy search more effective. This is especially important because making a genealogy search often involves doing a certain amount of mental jugglery due to the fact that often birth records are filled out in unusual ways and so you won't always find the information that you need in the place that you expect to find it.
Unexpected Twisting And Turning
Also, because often past birth records may have been destroyed for whatever reason, when doing a genealogy search based on birth records, it often results in hitting a dead end which in turn will force your genealogy search into many different directions causing many unexpected and twists and turns in your search.
So, in case you come across instances when your genealogy search has come to an abrupt halt because of missing or damaged birth records, you will then need to look for alternative sources such as searching records of church attended where, if you are lucky, records pertaining to baptism may give you the required information. Or, you may have to search through school records that can also provide similar information.
In this age of the Internet, online genealogy search has become much more convenient and a lot quicker and the access to information too is a lot more diverse and exhaustive which will make any genealogy search return a lot more information than if you were to manually sift through various records. There are also a number of sites such as Ancestry and Roots Web that provide you database search facilities and if you want to locate vital records you can even check out a city's official website.
However, there is no denying the fact that birth records will prove to be the best starting point in any genealogy search since they contain important as well as often vital information regarding family history and it will also provide a decent family portrait of individual members and thus you will get important clues into the past of people whose ancestry you are searching.
