By Juliana Smith
It's a question I see frequently in my editor's mail: "How do I locate a town of origin in (England, Scotland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Norway) for my ancestors? To the non-genealogist, the town of origin might seem to be just another insignificant piece of trivia about our ancestors, but to those of us with a passion for learning all we can about our ancestry, it is one of the most exhilarating finds there is. To be able to reach back in time and actually take our history to a place that you can see on a map, and hopefully someday even visit, is a feeling that's hard to beat!
The trouble is, that information is not always where you might hope to find it, and it often takes a bit of digging. But there are clues in many records that could help point you in the right direction. Let's take a look.
Home SourcesThe first stop is always at home, and even if you thought you had exhausted all that you can find and interrogated every relative, it can still be worth a second look. For years we asked my grandmother if she knew what town her father had come from. She knew that it was northeast of Warsaw but couldn't remember the name. Years later she shared some photographs from the old country and there it was on the back of a photograph--Wyszkow. The city was later confirmed with my great-grandfather's alien registration...
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