Ask any of your relatives for their experiences during childhood, their jobs, their education, their particular immigration story or history and their family life. Also note any of their physical and personality traits. Be open When asking, try as much as possible to be flexible, catering your questions to each interviewees digressions. Most likely, the names of relatives you do not know or have not heard from for a while, will crop up as these names could have been vital during the growing up years of your parents. Usually, your parents could be able to help you as well as they might have access to and eventually look up legal family records such as certificates of death, birth, records in the military, etc. Surnames were not much of a concern in areas where the population was smaller and people did not have a difficult time referring to one another or getting confused as to who was who. However, as population increased, so did the use of the same names for several individuals. It wasn t unusual to have 10 Johns, seven Williams and four Richards all living in the same town. There are some slaves who used their last owner s name when they were declared free but then most of them didn t. Further research is still needed. Step four is about the slavery and owner s research. Once you found your ancestor s slave owner, you need to track their records to know what they did about their properties. If the specialized websites were not that successful, another thing worth checking out is Ancestry.com. This has information way beyond the first world war especially when a lot of immigrants left Europe in the hopes of something better in the new world. The quest for knowing one s path will be long. These claims, outrageous as they may be for modern people, helped clans and tribes to build stronger ties within families and groups. Genealogy was also a way to claim dominance over another tribe. Early genealogical research was passed on through oral tradition but when societies began to learn how to write, records of family history began to appear.