Family History
Researching your ancestors is a very special way of expanding your self-knowledge and learning more about your family dinamics. For the first glimpse it might seem like a 'boring' work, but if we start it we will soon find ourselves to be passionate about it, since it brings great joy and happiness into our lives.
What information can we find?
The most important information that we can learn through family history research is the birth, marriage, and death dates and locations of our ancestors. An important factor of the research is their religious affiliation, since for a long period of time the records were kept by the churches and not by the government. In addition to the basic information, however, in many cases we can find information about their place of living, occupation, cause of death etc. There is a great variety in the amount of information recorded in the registers in different eras.
How far can we go back in time?
In general, we can find data about our ancestors until the middle of the 1600s - the beginning of the 1700s, however, in some cases the registers were damaged or burned, or otherwise destroyed, which makes the search impossible. When researching older registers, the amount of information recorded in them is only handful compared to what is common nowadays, making the search more difficult, since we have to decide based on minimal information whether the given record belongs to our ancestor or not.
Ancestral mathematics
We all have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, 16 second great-grandparents and 32 third great-grandparents and so on. Looking back to 12 generations, we all have 4094 ancestors who lived before us. During their lives our ancestors - just like we - have experienced many difficulties, challenges and pain in addition to happy and joyful moments. However, we are living proof that the previous generations managed to solve the challenges they faced with perseverance and courage, this way enabling us to be born. By researching our ancestors, we get a greater insight into their lives. The knowledge we gain about them can be a resource for cooping with the difficulties experienced in our own lives!