With Genealogy, You’re Never Done

Whenever I give genealogical lectures or teach beginner’s classes in how to perform family history research, I typically talk about how no matter how long you work on your family tree, with genealogy, you’re never done. There will always be a new ancestor who turns up, a new piece of information to discover, or an unsolved mystery to tackle. I also stress the importance of “never giving up” no matter how long it takes to find an elusive ancestor or bust through that one seemingly impossible brick wall. I know this first hand. I spent 15 years thinking I would never locate any information about one of my ancestors, my grandfather’s brother, Sam Figlar.

But thanks to persistence, the Internet, and a bit of luck, last year I cracked the case. You can read about the steps I took to find Sam in the current issue of Internet Genealogy Magazine, available now on newsstands. The case study I wrote talks about how I started with very little information (only a family story about him), the failed attempts to find information on him 11 years ago, and then how last year I resumed the search, and following several online leads, finally locating the missing details to find the answers about what really happened to Sam.