It is a fact of life that your family’s history is part of a greater total. If you don’t succeed completely to put the pieces of your family’s history together, you might find out a lot about history itself and the part that family members of yours may have had in it. Be it small, important or even significant.

The quest for the relatives of your family can sometimes bring you a family reunion, or a meeting with family members you didn’t know before or only when you were a little child. Using this method you can run into distant uncles or cousins who have information for you. Or you may learn that a harsh quarrel in the family has cut off part of the family, and your research can maybe help to bring the family together again.

Another ground for a separation could be uncontrollable reasons like a war, a natural disaster or an adoption. You must realize that you can bump into secrets, or memories one doesn’t like to speak about, scandals even when you use genealogy as a way to unveil the history and behavior of your family.

You might even be the one who brings the family back together while they might have a better understanding of each other this time. For many people this is a reason to bring back family traditions and tell about secrets that should have been out in the open long time ago.

The study of family and family members has been done for ages. It is only natural curiosity to know about your past, isn’t it? So throughout the centuries people have been digging.

In general, genealogy was only done for people of power in the old days. It was important, for instance, to know the history of noblemen and –women. A wannabe ruler had to be able to show information that he was the man for the job. In many of those situations they used genealogy to determine who was who.

Anyone with a claim to power or money or both had to show that his or her ancestors were the ones that accumulated all that. So he could demonstrate that he was the rightful heir. That was a hard thing to do, and only with genealogy he might succeed.

Very often heraldry came to the rescue. The coat of arms of noblemen could assist in determining the blood lines.

Modern studies of ancestry point out that very often these methods that were used to claim a rightful position, were not that authentic as they seemed then. Of course the most famous fabrications were of those rulers, kings or emperors that saw themselves as an instrument of the gods or as the founder of civilization as such.

It is a bare fact that genealogy only works when the truth is told or written down, and truth, well everybody has its own truth. Finding ‘modern’ documents on your family’s history is therefore far easier than going farther back in time.

But it is a story anyway! Just imagine if you can truly say that you have a touch of Royal blood in your veins…

Remember that when you are looking for answers, you must have a need for authentic answers. So for starters, you use modern ways to discover the truth of your family.