How do I find my ancestry beyond my grandparents?

Question:

How do I find my ancestry beyond my grandparents?

I am originally from Latvia, Europe. Any ideas how to find out my ancestry?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: The basic research steps have already been mentioned but worth repeating. First you need to find all the information that you can from family sources including dates, places and any "family stories". Genealogical records tend to be created by towns, companies, states etc. and they are all located in a specific place and that locality is important. It would be great if you knew when the family actually emigrated from Latvia as that would narrow down the search.

Having said that the single best starting point would be Cyndis lIst (see url below in the source box). This is a set of links to sites on Baltic genealogy many of them specifically from Latvia. As already mentioned it appears that if you are of Jewish descent there are quite a number of resources.

Next I think you should go to www.rootsweb.com and register there. This is one of the largest free genealogy sites on the net and one of the most active. There are several Latvian email forums, I've put the link for the General Latvian forum in the sources box below. If you search that board you are bound to find references to at least the locality your ancestors were in and often their surnames. It is a participatory process where you can post questions (much like here) and people will help, you then are expected to share when you can. The difference from Yahoo Answers is that everyone on the Lativian list is doing genealogy for Latvian ancestors and they are a much better resource.

Just as an aside, I did a Google search on "Latvian genealogy" and came up with more that a half a million hits, now I didn't spend a lot of time looking but most of them seemed quite solid so there is lots of material out there and if you are really lucky you may find some cousins who are already researching the family name.

Finally if you start getting to the point where you want to look at orginal records you will need to go to www.familysearch.org which provides access by microfilm to many records. I've included the link to the Library's listing of Latvian materials (I hope it works, it is quite complicated) [you get to it at the site by clicking on the "Library" tab across the top and then the "Place" search button down below. These microfilms are available for reading at any of 3000 Family History Centers and hopefully one is close to where you live.