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Position:Home>Genealogy> Need help researching family history of the Boulger surname can you help?Question: Need help researching family history of the Boulger surname can you help?Me and My Husband have been researching our family surname and we know there are variants in the spelling, they are: Boulger, Bolger, Bulger Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: Everyone "loves" certain sites (ie ancestry).. but to me, popular does not mean the "ONLY" place to find information. My opinion comes from the fact that almost all of my personal research came from pre-ancestry.com, thus I know there is a ton of stuff out there, independent of the popular sites. (And no, that does NOT mean that I didn't use the computer). My personal advice is to adjust thinking from looking for a compiled/ packaged "Boulger family history"... to something you are creating for yourself. I constantly reccomend www.cyndislist.com - NOT as a search engine for Boulger, but as a way to see how many different types of sites are out there, with genealogical information. Break down what you need, into something manageable. IE.. you may have found that grandpa Boulger was raised in Wise county, Texas... thus, you want to visit the Wise county usgenweb page (a volunteer network, which has sites for all the counties in the US). Take time to search what the county has.. marriages, will extracts, land grants, cemetery files.. so forth. All of these county sites VARY as to type and quality of info. Family photos are most often going to be handed down in the family. This is where I always check the surname boards at genforum, to network with persons working the same name. The search box allows you to enter something like the state/county as a filter, or maybe the wife's maiden name if unique enough. SCROLL through the messages.. there are valuable ones that you may recognize as connected, but they don't always include your "key" words. The further back you are, the better your odds here. "Flip" to the wife's family board, and run the search again with husband's name. A site labeled as a history site is a goldmine for background, but can be overlooked. But history is made up of persons!! and those persons can be your family. Remember that families moved.. so you can be looking for births in one county.. land records in another.. marriages in still another. Remember genealogy's Golden rule that you are working back, one generation at a time. Focus on John Boulger/ Bulger who lived in Arkansas, and his immediate facts. His connections are "in" those records (watch for neighbor families.. they are often related). Post your brick wall, which is often a certain fact that you are stuck on, re a certain person, and certain place. Notice not only what the solution is, but what did people here use to find it? Honestly.. I'd rather build my own, than find what has already been done. It is more of a challenge (and you will quickly learn how many errors are out there, by finding the original sources). One step at a time. The MORE sources/ sites you have and use, the better off the product. |