Treasure Chest Thursday- Applications from Lineage Societies

One Treasure Chest of information that many researchers may overlook are the wonderful applications and related records submitted by other researchers to join a lineage society. Such societies include The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), The Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), The Daughter of the American Revolution (DAR), The Sons of the American Revolution (SAR), and The Mayflower Society, just to name a few.

Potential members must not only prove their ancestors’ involvement in the particular event in history but also provide proof of lineage for each generation there after until the present day generation. There is such a great deal of information in these membership applications and subsequent supplemental applications of members. Each application provides an enormous amount of research- the most difficult part for non-members is finding these records.

I recently met a distant cousin that was willing to share their membership applications with me for my own potential membership. Those documents provided so much information for me that I did not know about my own family. I will be forever grateful for her kindness in sharing these records with me.

How can you find these documents? Each society has different guidelines for accessing an ancestor’s records so you’ll have to do some research as how to go about finding out what’s available. The point is that there may be a wealth of information out there already gathered about your ancestors. See what’s available!

I’ve included some helpful links to get you started:

http://www.hqudc.org/

http://www.dar.org/natsociety/default.cfm

http://www.sar.org/

http://www.scv.org/crg.php

http://www.themayflowersociety.com/

http://www.nsdac.org/