By Ethan Foster
Mississippi State, Miss. (Take 30)---The Mitchell Memorial Library at Mississippi State University hosted a workshop Saturday to teach students the basics of family tree making, editing, and researching on Ancestry.com. The workshop is hosted multiple times a semester each school year and is open to both students and community members.
Deedee Baldwin, the History Research Librarian on campus, leads the Branching Out: Starting a Family Tree with Ancestry.com workshop to inform students on the topic of genealogy as it results to Ancestry.com.
“The point of it is to sort of help people get started on the site. Um, it shows them how to make a free account, how to start the tree, um, how to add to it and edit it. And how to search the records,” Baldwin said.
For Baldwin, genealogy is something she considers an “addiction” rather than a hobby. She was inspired by her grandmother to continue the tradition of remembering those who came before us.
“My grandmother was really into genealogy and so she used to have this binder of photocopies and pictures and stuff that she used to show me and that’s how I got into it,” Baldwin said. “And then I started doing it for myself back when I was in college a very long time ago and I’ve been doing it ever since.”
John Haynes is a Junior classics and history major at MSU from Memphis, Tennessee who attended the workshop after learning of the library’s offered resources.
“A few years ago, I set up a free account on Ancestry.com, but uh, I never really did a lot of searching with it because everything costs money. But since the library here has an Ancestry account, I wanted to see how to use that,” Haynes revealed.
Haynes also mentioned what he hoped to discover about his family with the new skills he learned from Baldwin’s teaching.
“I know we’ve been in America for a while,” Haynes said, “so I’m hoping to see when we came in from Europe.”
The Library Ancestry account is available for anyone to use for free.
For those interested in accessing free records from Ancestry.com, click here.