I remember with great fondness my very first months on campus as a Freshman. While everyone else enjoyed days of wine and roses, I would often be cooped up in my basement room of Dominic Hall listening to light music, illuminated by the desk lamp.

I’d often be found with the door open, letting the little clear air we could get circulate through the room. When I wasn’t occupied with Latin homework or reading, I’d often turn to family history research. Soon, I found my calling. I became a pusher.

I believe I’ve written in the past about the importance of knowing your family history for purposes of identifying risky behaviors, poor health, and maintaining traditions. However, my focus today is on the more addictive and gratifying side of this research.

Over the past two or three years, my friends have been introduced to FamilySearch. It’s a site run by the Mormons who are far more invested in knowing their family history than perhaps anyone else on the planet.

Their services are free, requiring only a valid email address to sign up. Once logged in, you’ll find the site has a lot of potential. In my humble opinion, it easily competes with Ancestry.com and perhaps surpasses it in some ways.

They offer a vast array of free record searches, including census records, baptismal records, and death certificates for the United States and abroad. The search feature is relatively easy to use and can be modified for results of varying precision.

However, my favorite feature of the website is the “shared family tree.” Unlike Ancestry.com, the FamilySearch tree is connected. Each individual has only one profile, which is open to collaboration and can be built upon by researchers globally.

Of course, this does have some drawbacks. Like Wikipedia, the information you get from FamilySearch is only as credible as the people typing it in. However, it’s possible to link records to individuals and use information extracted from those records to support specific life events.

I use it as my primary organizational database for all family history research, as it’s also capable of storing images and documents, which can be linked to profiles with one click. My friends enjoy it because it helps them sort the names and dates that have often confused them, floating in family discussions for years.

We have also discovered that it’s possible to determine how you’re related to other users by downloading the app and activating the “Relatives Around Me” feature. This has allowed for some interesting discoveries over the past year and a half, as more and more of my friends have entered the names of their parents and grandparents, linking themselves to the “shared family tree” through their great-grandparents or thereabouts.

However, I recommend that anyone who wishes to take this seriously invest in Newspapers.com or another comparable subscription service. Most of the information I’ve discovered about the personal lives and families of my ancestors comes from the newspaper.

Back in the day, especially in small-town America, they’d publish almost everything in the paper. I’ve found records of my grandmother’s dance recitals, piano recitals, and even a story about my grandfather (at 12 years old) shooting a neighborhood kid in the foot with a .22 caliber bullet.

Hence, the fun is endless once you begin to accumulate these stories that accompany the names and dates. For older relatives, it might be worthwhile to browse these articles with them and learn more about the stories associated with these details from their youth. That’s valuable information that gets lost as the older generations begin to fade.

I’d strongly encourage anyone interested in getting started with their family history to please contact me ([email protected]), and I’ll be more than happy to assist you. That also extends to anyone (including professors and alumni) who may want to take a quick crack at Newspapers.com.

Another feature worth highlighting before I close is the “Famous Relatives” tab, which displays your relationship with a vast number of historical individuals, including presidents, members of the royal family, Helen Keller, and others.

For some, this type of research is boring, and the thought of helping others with their trees would be too much. But for me, it’s just another day … in the life of a pusher.