The stories occur not only in time but in space, and learning about your family’s geography is one of the best ways to uncover more of your family’s genealogy. Also, understanding the places your family came from and the history of those places helps to give the story a broader context. Although unique, your family history is only one strand in the fabric of human history. At each point in the story your ancestors shared space, formed communities, and experienced the effects of global events and social trends. For people whose ancestors lived on Prince Edward Island, local historical maps, land records, biographies, and community histories are essential for understanding the basic information about these ancestors as well as the communities they belonged to. The Robertson Library’s digitization projects are making many such documents available to online researchers. As more documents are scanned, described, and opened to the public, researchers in genealogy, history, and other fields of study will be able to locate individual Islanders and see how these lives related to the world around them.
There are few stories you can tell about yourself that are more unique and individual than your own family history. Your genealogy, or family tree, is shared by at most a few other people, and the lines formed by the branches of this tree are just as unique to you and your siblings as your own strands of DNA. This is a story worth telling. It has shaped your genetic code, and most people would agree that the episodes that make up your family history are far more interesting to read than strings of DNA. Each of the relationships that form the branches on this tree has its own complex characteristics; some are well known and others are a mystery waiting to be uncovered.
These relationships are also of great interest to a wider community of researchers. Dozens of other genealogists have likely done research on aspects of your family tree that intersect with their own, and there is great opportunity to share information. General historians also use genealogy as a form of micro-history, and many have found it an important way to understand migration (Elliott) and gender history (Sandwell), to name only two areas.