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Competition: Who in your family has helped you the most with your research?

  • By Esther
October 16, 2013
Competition: Who in your family has helped you the most with your research?

We received many entries for last week’s Family History Month competition. Thank you to everyone that entered.

Congratulations to Sallie Shelton, winner of a PremiumPlus Family Site Subscription for her family site.

We loved what you wrote about the ancestor you’d like to meet:

My father’s great grandfather, Francis Asbury Hammond. His life would make a blockbuster movie! Joined a whaling ship at a young age and during a storm a barrel rolled over him breaking his leg. The captain dumped him off on the “Sandwich Islands” to die. The natives nursed him back to health. His life includes multiple ocean voyages back and forth from America to the Sandwich Islands. He was in the CA gold rush, helped the Mormon Battalion build a road from from CA to UT, had many continuing adventures. Sadly, he died in Mancos, CO where he was drug to death by a horse leaving a large family. He was honored among many people as having ultimate honesty and integrity. He lead a life of service to others. Of course I would love to meet him, although I would be a little intimidated by this amazing man. I am honored to be his ancestor!

This week, we’re holding another Family History Month competition to win a one-year free Data subscription to SuperSearch, our online search engine of billions of historical records.Every family has someone in the family who helps them the most with the hard task of preserving the family legacy. As part of Family History Month, we’d like to thank those who help us unlock our past.

For this week’s competition, tell us who in your family has helped you the most in your research and how.

Leave a comment below by October 23, 2013 and both you and your nominee will win a free Data Subscription to access billions of historical records at SuperSearch.

Good luck!
The MyHeritage Team

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  • Trisha Reed

    October 16, 2013

    My grandfather, Don Fry, is a genaeology buff and remembers EVERYTHING. My financial resources are limited and there is only so much free information on the web. He has told me so much I didn’t know about my dad’s side of the family! Although he’s 85, his mind is like a steel trap. He can spout names, dates of birth/death, and a wealth of other information at the drop of a hat. I’m so glad I’ve had the opportunity to pick his brain the last few years. We sat down last summer while I was visiting on vacation and pored over old photos, letters, etc. It was a great day. Hoping I’ll get another opportunity to sit down with him next summer.

  • Sharon Black

    October 16, 2013

    I had always promised myself that once my children had all started school I would begin my family tree but that had to be delayed when my husband passed away one month after our youngest son started school.
    I finally began my search in 2002 with the help of a friend who introduced me to various internet search options. I was totally blown away when a month after posting names on a message board I received a reply that begun a fabulous journey into my family history and a very close friendship that I will always treasure.
    Micky and I began sending emails and telephone calls everyday each giving the other a piece to our jig-saw. I was over the moon when she suggested I come and spend two weeks with her. (she lives in Melbourne, Australia and I live in Wellington, New Zealand.) Off I went with a suitcase full of photo’s and documents that we spent hours looking through and piecing the puzzle together. We were able to put names, dates and places to each other’s photo’s plus share documents.
    We have discovered that not only are we related on my father’s side but also my mothers which would have remained a missing piece if we had not connected.
    Even after ten years we are still researching our family and it is our greatest dream to travel to England together. I am very priviledged to have had Micky not only as a friend but also a relative……………….I will always be indebted to her.

  • Linda Taylor

    October 16, 2013

    My Uncle Andy was a great help with pictures & info. He kept telling us he didn’t know anything, but then we would get him talking & I think even he was surprised with what he remembered. I miss him.

    On my husband’s side of the family, his Mother’s cousin John has helped a lot with information & pictures & I just plain like visiting him, he & his wife are just really nice people & happy to share their pictures, knowledge & research. They have one ancestor (my husband’s Great Grandfather) who was a London fireman, who was honoured several times by the King. Twice to ride in Royal parades & by being present when the King personally handed out cigars for the birth of one of his children.

    Also, my husband’s Grandfather on his Dad’s side insisted on his children helping him to write his “memoirs before it was too late”. We learned a lot from our copy! Grandfather insisted that everyone who wanted one should receive a copy. It is going to lead us to relatives in Scotland on day!

    I know you said to name one, but only one of the people I have mentioned is still with us sharing what they remember. A few more family members have helped, but not as much as these three people. John’s research led us to the Firehall Museum in London, where we received a copy of their relatives time as a fireman. And what a great reason to go to England again & again!

  • Julie Carrington

    October 16, 2013

    My dad Ken has helped me the most with my research. He trecks off to the cemeteries with his brushes to clean the headstones so he can read the inscriptions. By unveiling this information it is also helpful with validating offspring as their names often appear on the headstone. He also goes to the local library to access the death notices from the Sydney Morning Herald. His contribution is invaluable.

  • Linda Aubrey

    October 16, 2013

    My sister Ina has helped me the most out of my family that is still living. My cousin Carol Ann did a lot of research starting in the 1970’s and up until her death in 1993. And she shared a lot with the rest of the family. But since then it has been Ina and I doing most of it.

  • Peggy Lauritzen

    October 16, 2013

    Without a doubt, it was my own parents. The genealogy bug bit them in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, when much of their family was still alive. My parents were older when I was born – the age of most of my friends’ grandparents. I went along with them as they collected information from their own parents, who were born in the late 1800’s. Both of my parents knew their grandparents, who were born in the mid-1800’s.

    These wonderful had first-hand knowledge of people who had served in the Civil War, those who had been slaves, and those who had been the first settlers of their families in eastern Kentucky.

    How grateful I am that they seized the opportunity to record the information from these people that are long gone.

  • Vikki Pearl

    October 17, 2013

    My treasured Uncle, who was old enough to remember the hard times growing up in war torn Holland. Unfortunately, he’s no longer with us and I miss asking him my ancestry questions.

  • Barbara Schmidt

    October 17, 2013

    It was my father. He always said he didn’t remember anything, that I should go to my aunt, she is the family history keeper. But after a while we figured out that actually he remembers a lot more than he might think and that my aunt being the youngest of the kids had HEARD of a lot of stories, but she was way too young to really remember them. And if my Dad didn’t know any further, he knew where to got, whom to ask, whom to call, etc. And he was always fully supportive of this “obsession”. My mom is, too. But he is really really interested in it, always asking, if I could hit through a brick wall, if I got any further at that dead end. And when he sees or reads something, he links it to me, sending an email or tagging me.

  • Melissa Gospodinoff

    October 18, 2013

    I never knew my dads side of the family, his dad passed when I was 5. He has a hard name to find and isn’t common in United States which is a German name. I found my dads first cousin and she knew my dads grandfather which helped me find his dad and his dad. I now have 4 generations on my dads side along with some photos. The best part my dads cousin and I are now best friends.

  • Barbara McDougal

    October 19, 2013

    My mother, Charlotte Minch got me interested in searching our family tree. She loved puzzles and that’s what our search has been solving. Through the records she left me when she passed away, I have discovered my birth father married after their divorce and I have a half-brother who is now helping to trace our tree.

  • Sebastian Gansauer

    October 20, 2013

    My 8th cousin once removed, Caryl Davis from Illinois helped me the most and still does. Through her i got to know all of my distant relatives who emigrated to the United States in 1883 and made the contact to their living descendants.
    Because of her the german and american parts of our family were reunited and we are visting each other as often as we can.
    Just this year 2 of my cousins attended our reunion in germany and were celebrating my birthday with me 🙂

  • Stuart Fischer

    October 20, 2013

    My sister Cheryl has contributed many hours of research, along with her twin Cindy, as far back as college over thirty years ago. Over the years, we have compiled what seems like volumes of information dating back to the 7th century Irish Annals.

  • Dan Hawkins

    October 20, 2013

    My wife. She started me in this “little hobby” twenty years ago. She has been with me every step of the way, and has this knack of finding things. She has been been my biggest help.

  • Elizabeth Grieve

    October 20, 2013

    It was my late uncle who got me started on genealogy but when I started to expand the tree, my new found distant cousin, Tracy Trim, helped me to expand my Cockburn line as I am a direct descendant through them. Since then, I have been in contact with lots of others who are also connected via different branches of the Cockburns and I’m loving every moment of it. I’ve also made loads of contacts through my husbands line as well and it was my much missed beloved mother in law Ann Grieve that gave me the basics and I like to think that she would be so chuffed with what I’ve achieved. 🙂

  • Renee Roepstorff

    October 20, 2013

    My sister, My mother past away when I was 2, she had been adopted and for along time we did not have much to go on, also my grandfather was born in the Cayman Islands and since he died in his early years we didn’t know much about his past. A lot of heart ache has gone through my family so things were not remembered or not divulged and we would like to set the past straight for our future kin. Thank You.

  • Cindy

    October 20, 2013

    My cousin by marriage. He is on my husbands side (which is Italian) and my hubands great great grandfather was the first from Italy to United States. As far as we can find out so far – no one else in the family has ever worked on the family tree. We live in two different states – he has provided me with photos, graves sites, birth cert. and death cert. from his state. Such a help. It sure would be nice to get a premium site to start looking for people in Italy.

  • Jason Stevens

    October 20, 2013

    Postmortem my grandparents and my wife’s maternal grandfather, Jim McCracken, have helped much in my research as after their passing I found much information that they had compiled that I was unaware of. On m wife’s side there was a lot of old info available that otherwise would not be easy to find as there was little extended family contact in that generation. I still have hope that a portion of that info my someday help us list Jim’s siblings and their families as we’ve yet to get those.

  • Julia Burns

    October 21, 2013

    My parent equally taught me about genealogy. The I added what I learned from college research from Professors, Dr. Jon Sensbach (now at Florida State) and Dr. Charles Bolton (Now at UNC Greensboro). I can now detect and figure out what is real, embellishment of the facts, and fake to a certain degree of certainty. I so wished that my father would have lived to see the advances that have been made and how easy it is as well as the reason to keep sources in check. The history is absolutely wonderful!

  • Pamela Brigham

    October 21, 2013

    My cousin Janet Brigham inspires me. I actually found her when participating in a genealogy publishing class! She was working walk-in registration and I needed to register. We both shared some information on our family history and realized we were fairly closely related. I knew many of the dates and places that my many relatives lived, but she had some of the stories. She told me several of these stories and I’ve continued on my genealogy searching ever since. I realized that while I could just put in names and dates, the stories make it so much more interesting and inspire me to continue my research.

  • Marsha Heatley/Rodriguez

    October 23, 2013

    I had the help of my grandmother Collette and grandmother Heatley. They both gave me lots of information about their side of the family. That was about 1955. I entered all that information on a blank genealogy form that was given to me by Grandma Heatleys’ neighbor Mrs. Smith, while I was on summer vacation in Henderson, Nv. That paperwork is in storage inside my cedar chest.

    I have always been interested in genealogy, but never got around to working on it again. Well, I started last month. I have gotten lots of work done. I though my moms dad was French, but so far it looks like Irish. My fathers grandmother on his dads side seems to be Cherokee Indian. The story is that she was stolen off the reservation and was taken by covered wagon to CA. These two sides of the family are not progressing much, but the other two sides are back 4 generations. Thanks for your help.

    Marsha Heatley/Rodriguez
    3585 Bear Creek Drive
    Las Vegas, NV 89115-0201

  • jonathan lewis

    October 23, 2013

    My maternal grandfather was born in Satmar, Hungary. He had 12 siblings. Only eight of them survived the Holocaust. The other four, together with their spouses and children, were all murdered by the Nazis. In total, my grandfather lost 4 sisters, 4 brothers-in-law and 22 nieces /nephews. Growing up, my mother knew very little about these lost relatives. There were no photos, no documents nor any evidence of these lost souls other than in the fading memories of my aged grandfather and his remaining siblings. At my grandfather’s funeral twenty years ago, my mother pledged to preserve the memories of the aunts, uncles and cousins she never met. To that end, she visited each of her living aunts and uncles to learn about these lost relatives. Based on those meetings, my mother was able to assemble a family tree that lists the name of each of her lost relatives along with their birth date and approximate age at the time of death. When I got older, I joined my mother’s efforts and expanded the scope of the project. I wanted more than dry statistics. I wanted to know these people as individuals. That was no small feat. By the time I got involved in the project, all of my grandfather’s siblings had passed away along with most of the people they grew up with. With a renewed sense of urgency and lots of perseverance, my mother and I tracked down childhood friends of my grandfather and his siblings and, with their help, we began to sketch a more personal profile of those of our relatives murdered in the Holocaust. This experience has been incredibly rewarding. It has brought me closer to my mother and, in a way, it has allowed me to bring to life people who died too soon.

  • Gail Strevy

    October 23, 2013

    I guess the person in my family who has helped me the most is my daughter, Tennille. She not only encourages me, she hasn’t nagged me even once about how much time I spend at the library when I could be babysitting!