I am primarily researching my family but I will broaden that to other families as I happen upon them. I have found that we are all interconnected in some way and no time is wasted by expanding my research. I found my best friend in high school was my 1st cousin 6 times-removed. Sadly, he died 6 months before I found out. My Dad was an orphan and he did not know much about his family only to find out Mom and Dad are 11th cousins. If you go back far enough, we're all cousins.

Always invite your relatives to provide stories about your personal family before they are lost forever. Names can be very similar and those stories will help in establishing a geography of the where abouts they lived so that a grave is not mistakenly taken as one of your own family. We all can be sensitive about our work but consider one thing: We all make mistakes. Try to be objective and considered the evidence on both sides. If the mistake is yours and you concede to the other side, you will gain more respect within the community. Don't be discouraged and give up. Learn from it and move on. Also, consider many managers are not relatives and they have dealt with many overly zealous family members. They may not accept your suggestion. You should know your family better than anybody else but that is not always the case. Don't give up if you are absolutely right without a doubt and escalate the matter with supporting evidence. People become skeptics over time but be patient with them. They like proof and they become more legalistic adhering to policy. Look up the policy to see if they have the right interpretation.

If you have a tightly knitted family, and your family is very close with yearly family reunions, your job becomes much easier. These families tend to share the same cemetery or at least in specific cemeteries within the same county. My personal family would own acres of land and a good number of them would be buried on their homestead and lost to history as to their location of burial. If you waited too long, always visit the local library for remote cemeteries in these cases. For instance, in North Carolina, whole cities are now under water when a dam was built creating Lake Norman. Duke Power Company went through the painstaking task of relocating cemeteries. This is available on the internet without going to the library. Chicago O'Hare Airport expanded their runways and they relocated one cemetery and one cemetery still remains within the airport property or built around the cemetery. Even, Ft. Campbell has a cemetery deep in their wooded confines. I know, I stumbled across it in training. It was so serene and beautiful, but I couldn't stay to read the tombstones. I was on foot and I could see no roads leading to this cemetery. I had a map and I was desperately trying to get out of the woods to view the terrain to get back on track. I would not be of any help finding it now but if you have more information about this cemetery, I would love to hear from you. The cemetery predates the existence of Ft. Campbell or at least before Ft. Campbell expanded to include the cemetery.

I started my family tree at the age of 15 years old. It is sad that some families will encroach on your heritage and make it their own. I encourage you to be respectful of others. There are some that seek notoriety. Please do not knowingly alter dates and names to fit in your family tree that belongs to somebody else. This practice is not genealogy and history will find you out. I am not talking about changes made in good faith because people in our family were known by different names than their birth name. However, the more famous the person is that you're connecting to, there will be volumes of books written that you cannot account for or even legal documents you were not aware of. Personally, I only want people that are really relatives in my family tree. If I find an error, I will and I have published a retraction. I enjoy reading about the common life with a Norman Rockwell envision capturing the human qualities with a sense of humor. Try this out and your Family Tree will have more meaning than a bunch of names.

There's one family tree that is free for the taking and the one that should be the most talked about. When you accept Jesus Christ as your personal Savior then we are brothers and sisters in Christ. That is the greatest Family Tree and everybody is welcome to be a part of this family that will last forever and forever.