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So my daughter (6th grade) has to do a "heritage project" for school. She has to say where her forefathers came from, any ancestry info, customs, any towns/villages they lived in before coming to America, etc etc etc....
Sounds pretty simple but it is far from it. First, my family never had that "closeness" where relatives would be around all the time. My parents never told me about our heritage or anything else. To be truthful, I'm not even sure "what" I am other than an American (and that's fine with me). To top things off, I haven't spoken to any of my family members in almost 30 years and really have no desire to. Like I said, we were never a "close" family.
My husband also has very little info on his family's background other than the fact that his grandma was a school teacher "down south" and had gotten some recognition and a letter from the President (don't know which one and no one knows where the letter is). Other than that? Nothing.
Sooooo, how do I proceed in helping her with this project??? I tried looking on Ancestry.com, Ellis Island, etc but I can't find anything because I don't have any exact names. Do I just make something up??
You must know the names of a few of your relatives and where they live. Hunt around on the internet to see if one of them is listed in a family tree somewhere. You might even find that someone's listed you without your knowing.
Start with names of your grandparents. Go to your public library, see if they have heritagequest. Look up their names in the general area/state they were living and see if you can find the family that way. the 1930 census has my grandparents on it, also the 1920 census.
Follow it back, write the names of their parents down, find them on the 1910 and previous censuses if you can...
Is the name unusual? that will help a lot. If you are a White or a Brown, this may be nigh impossible.
If they came over post 1895, they will be somewhere on ellisisland.org likely. check there.
Is it an old family, like have they been in america since before the turn of the century, or even well before that? If it is an old american family - something will have been written about it by someone. Old american families often have huge very detailed genealogies that someone has written about. Some even have books published about certain families.
Are you catholic? the catholic church and parish records are very detailed and if your family has always been in the same parish, you can start with baptismal and wedding records.
but I would start with your public library, they have some amazing resources online now. Look at genealogy.com and ancestry.com. Again, your library may have ancestry.com free in the library. Ours does.
And start by writing down everything you DO know, full names and birthdates and years of deaths, etc. Where they lived, etc.
if you have ancestry.com, try a census search of where you think they lived based on only the last name. If you are lucky, yo will find a family that links up.
I agree that your best bet is to try ancestry.com, or other geneology sites. I joined just a week ago to research my maternal side of the family. My paternal side has been traced back to the 1600's, and yes, as mentioned earlier, sometimes families do have books with their complete history, our does, but getting a copy is not always easy as they are generally in limited quantities. I finally inherited one just a couple of years ago. And my father recently wrote a more detailed version, too. But the nice thing about ancestry.com, if you are lucky, you can come across other people who have also researched your family name, such as distant relatives, and you can learn quite a bit that way. I traced part of my mother's family back to the 1800's, and even came across a few pictures, but for now I'm at a dead end. I'll try again one day, there are bound to be more family members researching eventually. It's actually a lot of fun researching your family history. You did say you'd already tried that, did you search people's family trees as well as birth/death certificates etc., and search maiden names as well? Did you locate either your parents or your dh's parents? Even locating just one can give you some leads. And regarding you and your dh's last names, another suggestion would be to look up the origin of them. If nothing else, you could get an idea of what possible country your names originated.
But oh, how I first hated those school projects, my older kids had to do them several times over the years. One of the first times was when my dd was in third grade. The new teacher (who eventually lost her job thankfully, she wasn't the brightest teacher I've ever come across) sent home the paperwork asking questions like, "what year did your family come through Ellis Island", "ask your grandmother for a recipe from her home country", etc. She actually called me into complain because we said we'd been in the country since the 1600's, and were unable to come up with exact dates/"home country" recipes etc. at that time, because our family members with that history were out of town/recovering from surgery. So the teacher told me we'd lost our heritage. Once my father returned, we re-did the assignment, turning it in late with all the exact info, including pictures of our family crest etc., but the teacher didn't believe it was truly our family history. *sigh* I sincerely hope your dd's teacher is not as fussy. Thankfully that was the worst of our experiences with these family projects, and now I'm well armed with all the info when my 6 year old is eventually faced with them. I do know from speaking to other parents, some actually did make up some of their family background because they knew so little as well. Good luck!
So my daughter (6th grade) has to do a "heritage project" for school. She has to say where her forefathers came from, any ancestry info, customs, any towns/villages they lived in before coming to America, etc etc etc....
Sounds pretty simple but it is far from it. First, my family never had that "closeness" where relatives would be around all the time. My parents never told me about our heritage or anything else. To be truthful, I'm not even sure "what" I am other than an American (and that's fine with me). To top things off, I haven't spoken to any of my family members in almost 30 years and really have no desire to. Like I said, we were never a "close" family.
My husband also has very little info on his family's background other than the fact that his grandma was a school teacher "down south" and had gotten some recognition and a letter from the President (don't know which one and no one knows where the letter is). Other than that? Nothing.
Sooooo, how do I proceed in helping her with this project??? I tried looking on Ancestry.com, Ellis Island, etc but I can't find anything because I don't have any exact names. Do I just make something up??
I can't imagine that making something up would be a good lesson to teach your daughter. How about talking to her teacher about the situation and seeing if your daughter can do some kind of alternate project? Maybe you can just do some generic research on all the surnames that you know of in your family and your husbands? Like what the names mean, where they likely came from, family crest, etc. This website here has a lot of generic info about surnames: Coats of Arms (Family Crests) & Surname Histories
There are certainly ways to hunt down your specific ancestry but it can take a lot of work (and fees) which would be a lot for a simple 6th grade project and I imagine the teacher would not require that much from you. Unless you want to, of course but it doesn't sound like you're that interested.
There are certainly ways to hunt down your specific ancestry but it can take a lot of work (and fees) which would be a lot for a simple 6th grade project and I imagine the teacher would not require that much from you. Unless you want to, of course but it doesn't sound like you're that interested.
I looked on RootsWeb (another poster mentioned it) and found info on my mother/father. However, in order to get the information to go back another generation, I would have to write to the SSA and pay $27 each to get a printout of their SS card applications (and who knows how long it would take to get them)
I'm interested in my daughter's school work. However, I'm not interested in our geneology. Like I said in my OP, I haven't seen or spoken to anyone in my family in about 30 years and have no interest in tracking them down to find out anything. In addition, my family never practiced any customs from another country, never prepared any foods from another country or anything like that. We're American. Plain and simple.
I'm going to have to talk to the teachers who assigned the project and see what we can work out.
I looked on RootsWeb (another poster mentioned it) and found info on my mother/father. However, in order to get the information to go back another generation, I would have to write to the SSA and pay $27 each to get a printout of their SS card applications (and who knows how long it would take to get them)
I'm interested in my daughter's school work. However, I'm not interested in our geneology. Like I said in my OP, I haven't seen or spoken to anyone in my family in about 30 years and have no interest in tracking them down to find out anything. In addition, my family never practiced any customs from another country, never prepared any foods from another country or anything like that. We're American. Plain and simple.
I'm going to have to talk to the teachers who assigned the project and see what we can work out.
Are you anywhere near an LDS Family Center? You can go there and order censuses and other items. They will get them in for you. You can also serch online (search familysearch -- you do not have to me LDS to use the site.)
Also try the Library of Congress . If you have a father who was in the service, there are enlistment records at NARA (I found my Dad's WWII enlistment)
Looking up the origins of your maiden name and your dh's name and going that route sounds like the best course of action.
In the 9th grade, I was in a similar position. I was NOT allowed to discuss family. Sometimes, when my mother or stepdad got to drinking, they'd tell stories, but I didn't think my freshman year Honors English teacher was looking for a history on my mother's slutty & drunken exploits or how my stepfather's dad married the pregnant 16 year old with a 2 year old child 2 weeks after his mother passed from cancer.
So, I snuck some old pictures out of Mom's photo albums and wrote some narratives about some of my more pleasant memories to go along with each photo. I addressed a letter to my teacher on the first page explaining that although I knew the full names and birthdates (but not years) of my mother, stepdad, my "real" dad and my 3 siblings, I couldn't tell her what all of their father's names were or any further back. I explained that to ask for this information would cause "problems" for me at home.
I got a B+ - she took the assignment as is. I think it's great that your daughter has support at home from you. I'm sure if your "unique" situation was explained to the teacher, she would support your daughter's creative efforts in researching her personal history, as much as she is able.
We flat out made up whatever we didn't know. First off, it was 5th grade for us, not an assignment worthy of spending hours upon hours "researching" stuff for. Second off, I'm kind of private about my family and didn't really want everyone knowing specifics (my own mother didn't want me listing her actual name and info anywhere so we fudged on that too). Thirdly, it was just busywork anyway, any actual learning about the family or our heratige wasn't going to happen in a weeks's time but over the course of their lives.
There were several school projects like that and actually making up stuff was a pretty good lesson to teach the kids since they will likely be faced with stuff like this many times over the course of their lives and need to learn what's important and worth putting their effort into, and what isn't and what's nobodies business anyway.
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Once my father returned, we re-did the assignment, turning it in late with all the exact info, including pictures of our family crest etc., but the teacher didn't believe it was truly our family history. *sigh* I sincerely hope your dd's teacher is not as fussy. Thankfully that was the worst of our experiences with these family projects, and now I'm well armed with all the info when my 6 year old is eventually faced with them. I do know from speaking to other parents, some actually did make up some of their family background because they knew so little as well. Good luck! 
