How to Trace Your Ancestors: A Step-By-Step Guide
Last year, I wrote about my experience in uncovering the life story of my great-great-grandfather. I learned things about him that even my grandmother (his granddaughter) had no idea about. I started this from scratch. I only knew his name, birthplace, and field of work. For the other branches of the family, I was not as lucky. Nevertheless, I found a couple of amusing stories. I learned that one great-grandparent was killed by Japanese soldiers in our hometown in Rizal.¹ I discovered that most of my recent ancestors were farmers.² I was also told that Apolinario Mabini was captured by the Americans while hiding in another great-grandparent’s house in Nueva Ecija.³ (See footnotes below for these side stories)
Now let me tell you how I found out these stories and teach you how you can do the same to learn more about your roots, and hopefully, you will “meet your great-grandparents” too.
Why do this?
Honestly, why put your time and effort into such a seemingly inconsequential endeavor? I started my ancestry journey after the death of a grandmother. Maybe it was partly my own way of grieving. Needless to say, I did put a copious amount of effort into this “project”. If you are a fan of detective stories, you will probably enjoy assuming the role of the investigator and researcher yourself. As cliche as it may be, knowing our ancestors and what they had gone through will remind us of the brevity of human life and the significance of zooming out to a bigger picture.
1. Build your family tree
I started my ancestry research by creating our family tree. Yes, that same thing you last did in grade school. You can do this on paper, but it will be much easier to do it digitally with the help of a laptop or a smartphone. The most popular websites are ancestry.com, familysearch.org, and myheritage.com. When adding a member to your tree, be as detailed as possible, do include the middle name, maiden name, and nickname, then add their birthday, birthplace, date & place of death, and marriage details if applicable.
Go up and up, then expand sideways
When building the leaves of your family tree, prioritize going directly up the family tree. That means that after creating nodes for yourself, your siblings, your children, and your parents, add your four grandparents next, and then their eight parents, and so on. You will quickly find that you have hit a dead end. Do not despair! This is just the beginning.
After reaching this inevitable dead end, you can now go sideways: add your aunts, uncles, and cousins to the tree. You may think: “But I’m only interested in my direct ancestors! Not the whole bunch of my extended family.” However, you will soon realize why adding your other relatives to your family tree is helpful — simply put, you and your cousins share most of your ancestors. (i.e. 1st cousins share one pair of grandparents and all ancestors up the tree, 2nd cousins share a pair of great-grandparents and up, 3rd cousins share a pair of great-great-grandparents and up, and so on)
2. Check for existing family trees
If a person in your family tree happens to be an ancestry.com user and has set their family tree public, then it is your lucky day. You will save time because you can simply copy or merge his tree to your own. This will also copy the tree leaves’ details, including photos. Note that for ancestry.com, this is a paid feature. You may also ask your siblings, parents, grandparents, or cousins if they have created a family tree before, even with pen and paper.
3. Speak to your grandparents
Talk to the oldest living members of your family and ask them the names of their parents, siblings, and grandparents. Go to your grandparents. Go to their siblings. Ask them to tell you their stories. They keep a treasure trove of fascinating stories waiting to be told. Do you know how your grandparents met? How about your parents? What were they like as a child? As teenagers? It will be fun, and they will surely enjoy retelling these old tales too. You may want to record these conversations too. They will be priceless once your grandparents (or parents) pass away. Fair warning though: memory is malleable, so don’t treat these stories as facts and do cross-reference them with photos and stories from other family members.
At first, I could not believe that a person would ever forget the names of their grandparents. But ask your grandfather and he probably can’t tell you the name of his own grandfather right away. One way to jog their memories is to schedule multiple “interviews” with them. Do not do everything in one sitting. To help them remember, a visual trigger may be beneficial, so…
4. Go through old family photo albums
Explore that dusty family baul for old photos and documents and ask, ask, ask everyone. Who were these persons? Where was this? What happened during the day this photo was taken? If you have spare time, you might as well do your family a favor and scan these photos (or just use your smartphone’s camera) to digitally preserve them.
MyHeritage.com has a set of nifty tools for old photos available with a click of a button. With the power of AI, photoshopping skills are not required to accomplish amazing results. First, the tool can automatically repair and remove imperfections such as folds, tears, holes, stains, etc. Secondly, it can also colorize monochrome images.
Lastly, it can even animate people’s faces from old photos. You will get to see your ancestors blink, smile, and tilt their heads! (It’s kind of creepy)
Other AI-powered web apps you may find useful are letsenhance.io (scales up pixelated images) and remove.bg (automatically removes the background from photos of people).
5. Search for digital records
In addition to providing a tool for building your family tree, these ancestry websites will also give you access to digital census records with a convenient search function. Although most are US documents, there are also Philippine digital records of births, deaths, and marriages. All the different ancestry websites share most of their sources.
If you are lucky, you may even find the exact location of an ancestor’s grave and a photo of its headstone, like when I discovered my great-great-grandfather’s.
Transit and household census records are also available, but they are mostly US documents.
6. Request for local registry records
For Filipinos, these documents can be requested online either through PSA Serbilis or PSA Helpline. Yes, you can even request documents that are not under your name. You can check if the Statistics Office has records of your grandparents, but you need their full name, as well as the date and place relevant to that particular document.
Pre-WW2 records are hard to come by since many records were destroyed during the war before they were digitized, especially near Manila. Another option is to physically go to your local city/municipality hall or church. They may still keep old records in the civil registry. Speaking of churches, you may also reach out to a Mormon chapel near you since they also collect family history records. They do operate the familysearch.org website, after all.
7. Connect with other potential resource persons
Do not be afraid to send cold emails and Facebook message requests to strangers. I have done this myself. I reached out to all sorts of people ranging from scholars (whose research intersected with the life of my great-great-grandparent) to distant relatives (who might remember names that my parents and grandparents cannot). I followed Facebook pages like Historic San Mateo and joined Facebook groups like Manila Nostalgia where people share old photos and stories. Maybe you can even talk to the oldest living person in your barangay?
8. Read about the history of your hometown
You can start with Wikipedia and your local government website. Check their references so that you can read them directly from their sources. Another useful resource is the National Library Archive which is available online. The website may seem archaic, but it is quite informational as it contains the history of Philippine barrios and towns. The website contains digitized versions of 1950s documents written by local school teachers to chronicle the different towns’ pre-colonial and colonial history, with lists of anecdotes and local customs.
9. Employ the services of professionals
Genealogists are the people who do ancestry research for a living. They trace and study the descent of persons or families. “Family History Research” services can be availed from these professionals for a hefty fee.
10. Use DNA ancestry test kits
This is probably what you were thinking before reading this piece. It is currently the most popular way to get a glimpse of your ancestry. Companies like 23andMe and Ancestry offer at-home genetic test kits for a fairly affordable price (as low as $99). You just need to mail back the kit with either your spit or a cheek swab (depends on the test), and voila! you can unlock your DNA’s secrets.
It is easy to misinterpret these test results because of these companies’ misleading advertisements. What the results do tell you is how you relate to the people currently living in these parts of the globe. It compares a tiny portion of your DNA with those of all the other people in the company’s genetic database. If it matches the testing company’s reference population of a specific country, then that country will appear in your “Ethnicity Estimate” list. The percentage represents how strongly the patterns of your genetic markers match those ethnicities. In other words, the results are simply the company’s “best guess”. It is limited by several factors, as explained in this Vox video.
So although it is fun to take these DNA ancestry tests, they do not tell you where your ancestors lived. Instead, they give you probabilities where you are likely to have relatives today.
It’s notable that DNA testing accuracy varies a lot by application, with finding a DNA relative being a lot more reliable than determining ancestry, and loads more accurate than, say, finding your ideal diet for your DNA.
https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/12/13/20978024/genetic-testing-dna-consequences-23andme-ancestry
But that’s the other exciting thing — these tests also match you to potential relatives who also got their DNA tested. You can discover long-lost family members, as many other people did. Another factor to consider is the value of surrendering your genetic data to these companies. Not only is there a possibility of data breaches and hacking, law enforcement can also compel them to provide access to their DNA database. Even if you did not take a DNA test, if a close relative did, you can still be easily traced down.
Despite its limitations and privacy concerns, I am curious to take this test myself. Perhaps I will write a separate piece once I get this done.
Final Thoughts
When I started my ancestry research, I did not have an inkling that it would involve grueling detective work. It turned out to be a wild ride that not only has a lot of dead ends, but also twists, turns, and wild surprises. You will spend time and effort but you will feel rewarded every time you discover something new. To document your family history is to immortalize the lives of the people who came before you.
Footnotes
Side stories about my family
[1] Antonio Santos, killed by Japanese soldiers
My great-grandfather Antonio San Jose Santos was one of these 90 people imprisoned and killed by the Japanese. It is estimated that at least one out of every 20 Filipinos died at the hands of the Japanese during their occupation, so it is not unlikely that one of your own great-grandparents suffered the same fate 77 years ago.
[2] Guevaras & Santoses, one of the first settlers (and farmers) of our barangay
There were also a lot of these surnames in the list of barangay chairmen (previously called “tenientes”).
In these streets, Guevaras and Santoses still reside up to this very day. Most of our neighbors are at least third to fourth-degree relatives.
[3] Divina-Domingo‘s house where American soldiers captured Apolinario Mabini
This story was personally told to me by my grandfather before his death two decades ago. He showed me an old yellowish Manila Times newspaper clipping with his name and a photo of a barely recognizable house. Apolinario Mabini was printed in the title as it was the anniversary of his arrest in that same house in 1899. I remember my grandfather taking a bus back to his hometown in Cuyapo, Nueva Ecija to use that newspaper clipping as a proof of claim to the land whose ownership was being disputed by various parties. I never knew what happened after. (It appears that the government eventually claimed the property since a historical marker is now placed there.)
Apolinario Mabini, the Sublime Paralytic, was captured by the American soldiers on December 10, 1899, at about ten o’clock in the morning in the house of Don Zacarias B. Flores where he was then hiding, allegedly upon indication of a twelve-year-old boy by the name of Damian Pascual (son of the spouses Simon Pascual and Feliciana Domingo who are immediate neighbors of the Flores Family)
During the celebration of the centennial of the birth of Mabini, Mr. Damian Pascual, already 77 years old, told that such imputation is false and baseless and tends to discredit him so that his townmates may hate him as a traitor. Read about Damian’s version of the story here: http://cuyapo.blogspot.com/2010/11/history-of-cuyapo-part-3.html
Here’s an unpublished trivia: My grandfather told me that Mabini hid in the ceiling of the house.
Fun Fact: Every other person on Earth today is either your 50th cousin or closer.
