Creating a Family Tree
A large dark brown tree with no leaves stands in the center of a vibrant green field. The sky is a blue gradient from dark to light. While I didn’t have many proverbial “leaves” on my family tree to start, I felt hope from the world around it. “Maybe,” I thought, “things might be okay.”
To get started, I needed to create a high-level family tree. My father didn't really talk about his relatives much and while I knew my grandmother and my aunt, I didn't really know much about them. I did have one key fact about his father though. My brother had my dad's name for a middle name. My dad said that was because it was tradition for the men in his family to have their father's name as their middle name. Ok, so that gave me my grandfather's first name and I knew that he had the same last name as my father. I also knew that he died before I was born.
With these key facts, I hit Ancestry. Now, here's one of those places where privilege helped me out. While I'm currently unemployed, I had been a careful saver while I worked, so I was able to afford a "global" subscription for a couple months ($49.99/month at the time). I had hoped to only pay for one month, but the process ended up taking me a little longer because I was trying to figure out what I was doing.
I'm not generally a fan of giving any corporation my information, so I was careful to only add my name and birth date for myself. I punched in my dad and his mom's info (name, birth date, place of birth) into the tool and then I entered the little info that I had about my dad's dad (my grandfather). Bingo! I got several "hints" with records that might be my grandfather's. Honestly, I was surprised that it came up so quickly and one of the early records that I found had his middle name - which as you may remember, gave me his father's name and then I had my Canadian ancestor:
My great-grandfather aka G0 (G zero) in the Canadian Citizenship by descent community lingo!
If I had to redo my family tree again, here are the steps that I would take:
I would register for an ancestry.com account and I would enter as much information that I knew about my line of descent to my Canadian G0 (G zero)
I would carefully examine every “hint” that Ancestry gave me, (especially for common names!), including reading every record, to make sure that I was referring to the right person. I would that info to get the names, dates of birth, places of birth, and any other readily available information about my direct line
I would take that information available and begin to search for records to support my claim (more info in the collecting records post!) that I am a Canadian citizen