Why has genealogy become such an important study in recent years? Looking at it critically, it has existed for a long time.
For hundreds, even thousands of years, families have kept records of those who lived before them and passed these on to generations downwards.
Family trees and genealogies were constructed in families so that they could keep records of all those who had been in their families before, and in many ways, it has contributed a lot to history as we know it today.
Creating your own family tree can be one of the most rewarding things that you ever achieve! History is said to be a record of events that happen in the past, and a family tree or a genealogical study narrows this down to what happened in the past in a particular family.
As we know it today, genealogy serves more that just to tell us about who lived before us in our family trees.
Researchers and scientists in particular have based a lot of their findings on the discoveries that they have made by studying family genealogy.
They have been able to find out, for example, why some diseases will exist only in certain parts of the world - they find out that it's a gene that was passed on from family to family, and because that family lived in a certain area and they intermarried, the disease is prevalently located there.
Family trees have also been significantly relevant in reuniting families that were parted through wars or other circumstances.
During the Second World War especially, many families were torn apart because they had to flee to save their lives.
Through the mapping of family trees, databases have been created through which a lot people have been able to find members of their families from whom they were parted.
Online technology has made the creation of family trees and genealogies a lot easier than it was before.
Before the advent of the Internet, it was literally a manual task.
If you wanted to create a family tree, you had to go out there, talk to your relatives and make your recordings in a book.
In fact, many old families will have these books, but if you look at them, you will find that they took a lot of effort, were sometimes incomplete because there was no way of finding out certain details, and sometimes were inaccurate too.
The use of online resources has changed all this.
All one has to do today to create a family tree is log into special databases that contain names and details of families.
If you find that your family was recorded in these databases by someone from along your line, or using government records, you can then create an online family tree that you can post online for the entire world, and especially others from your family to see.
It means that if anyone else from your family tried to discover their roots, and they came across your family tree website, they can get details from it, they can contact you and you and you can meet and they can add details that you may not have had as well.
All one has to do after they have this information is work on the genealogy, which is the life stories of the people in your family tree.
Online innovation has cut the work that one has to do by half, and certainly made it much easier to do.
There are just so many reasons why every family should create their own family tree! You must not forget the invaluable memories and stories that the older members of your family can contribute.
But if you want to get started right away with investigating your family's genealogy just go online! You will find that there are tons of resources created just for that purpose.