Need help finding out ways of where me and my family descend from?

-Okay me and my brother have been trying to figure this out for years, we know that we are Mexican, Native American (cherokee) and Spanish but we truly do not know if we have any other culture in us. We have tried to find out through the web about our family history but don't really come up with anything that seems true. It's hard to find out through our relatives since we no longer have any grandparents with us and our other family members know as much as we do. We would like to find out if we have any other cultures in us. Would anyone know where we can come upon finding out our family history?? I would gladly appreciate the help, thank you very much. :)Good answers above. I have a feeling what you have done is put names in website hoping to find your family in a family tree. Well that is not a good way to do it. You want records. Family trees on any genealogy websites are the most unreliable things they have. They are subscriber submitted and there is a lot of misinformation in them. Even when you find the same information on the same people from many different subscribers that doesn't mean the information is correct. Too many people copy without verifying. You start with yourself and work back one generation at a time documenting everything as you do. Each generation you go back the family lines double and after awhile you might find it best to work on one family line and then when you run into a brick wall, set it aside and work on another.
Genealogy is not what people know/ remember. For almost all of us, that would stop us in our tracks after maybe 50 yrs. Genealogy is about finding records, made at the time.

Use the grandparents for example. Since they are dead, you get their death certificates to provide dates and places of birth and death. It usually includes names of their parents (unless no one knew this when they died). Having the date and place of BIRTH now gives you where to look. If they were born before 1930, you normally will be able to find them in the census (you didn't know you can search that, did you?). Once you have the details about each of the 4 grandparents, it "links" you to 8gr grandparents, and you do the same for each one of them. Instead of thinking of your "family history" as a whole, you must think about each ancestor as exact people, who were born at different dates and different places. That's because the date and place affects what records you use. There were no birth/death certificates in the 1800s..so you use alternate sources like church records, tombstones, etc.

Those records will tell you what you need to know. By midnite tonite, I bet you can have the death date and place of each grandparent to start with. They would usually be in the social security death index (at rootsweb.com under searches). Bookmark us, and hang out, ask questions as you go.

Every thing but everything happens when you realize to use RECORDS and not memory.



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