The beginning

As far back as I can remember my grandma Thompson would tell me stories about our ancestors, on story in particular she told me was that we descended from William and George Rogers Clark, the great explorers and warriors of the American Revolution. When I was 8 I was given a book:

The book Background to Glory was one that my grandma kept in her personal library in her classroom, she was a 3rd grade Teacher at the local elementary school. I read that book cover to cover and was simply amazed that I was related to such an important person.

I was told stories about other ancestors as well, the great grand father that worked with Thomas Edison, the great Uncle that died in WWII, and the great grandpa that left his family to be a cowboy in the old west. Growing up I took the stories as gospel, as I got older the stories faded and I lost interest.

After getting out of the military myself in 2003 I was going through old pictures and things with my mom and came across an old piece of paper. On it it listed the lineage of my Great Grandfather Baxter Judd. Through a very confusing series of lines crisscrossing the paper it established his paternal lineage. In a small notation on the page it said Marblehead, Mass 1624. With the names and dates I made a profile on Ancestry.com

From that day on I have been assembling bits and pieces of our story. In the beginning I had little clue what I was doing or how to do it. I spent hours on Ancestry under the mistaken belief that everything on there was accurate. After more than a year of putting together what I thought was a pretty amazing family tree I learned that it was grossly inaccurate thanks to many small mistakes that sent me down errant lineages. It was not until I reached out to a professional genealogist that I realized that Ancestry is a resource, but a very unreliable one if you are using other users tree's. 

Now ten years later Ancestry has made a lot of great improvements, although other users trees are sketchy, the databases at your disposal are invaluable. Many thousands of dollars have been saved on travel thanks to instant access to their databases. I ended up starting completely over and went about it the proper way with instruction from the Family History section of Brigham Young University, who now have their free classes online. In my next couple of post's I am going to detail the steps I took to begin my research and the process I created for myself to ensure accurate information.