There can be many surprises uncovered in comparing names and dates in old documents. They may reveal a person's real age, someone's profession or you may find out who the real mother of a child was. For those with a lineage to a small community with few people to marry such as a just formed town, the structure may not branch out like a family tree but weave back upon itself like a family river showing multiple ties to the same antecedent. One Milford story is there is the absence of any record for a woman after she was accused of being a witch except that her husband moved to Milford with an un-named second wife. Speculation is the first wife escaped and then hid her true identity. John Birdsey was caught kissing his wife on Sunday, but rather than submit to the authorities, he ran for it, got to the Housatonic River, jumped in and swam over to Stratford. He came back under cover of night, got his family and took them to Stratford where he settled. His genealogy shows him to be the ancestor of Clarence Birdseye, who developed frozen fruits and vegetables.

Researching a person's family history is never as easy as many genealogical advertisements purport it to be. Many families Americanized their names upon arriving creating gaps in rejoining what appear to be separate families with different names but once had a common parent. We recommend the search engine Duck Duck Go because they don't track what you type in order to show you ads for that subject. It can be embarrassing being asked to buy something spelled like a similar item as a family name or the word's meaning has changed. A completed chart of where a family has been through the process of tracking down documents can be very rewarding. Nearly everybody has someone notable they may be distantly related to if willing to invest the time to look back enough generations. Adding up our parents times going back 6 generations result in over 4 1/4 billion ancestors. That doesn't factor in that families tended to have more children to help out.

Milford has a lot of support not only in finding what information, documents or photos of graves that others have compiled but also in documenting and preserving your own story. Handle your original photos as little as possible. Sheet protectors should preferably be mylar, PVC plastic smells. Store them in covered boxes and acid free folders with low humidity below 70 degrees in the dark. A capful of milk of magnesium in bottle of club water may neutralize acid to help prevent further damage to existing paper records such as newspapers. Current media types for saving items electronically would not last or have a working device to view or listen to it in the future. A new DVD format that engraves into metal promises hundreds of years but still faces having something to retrieve your data. Flash drives are more affected by how much they were used than time. Referred to as laser rot, consumer DVDs burned on a computer may deteriorate between as little as 3 up to about 20 years, often at the short end of the range. Mechanical parts on a hard drive can jam and fail. Some floppy formats need a small battery charge to retain data. Older technologies relying upon tape including floppy disks will break down and lose it's magnetic abilities after about 20 years. For these reasons physical means whether on paper, a film or the grooves on a phonograph record are preferred. Copies of any documentation or photos should be saved with more than one person or organization. This offers some redundancy if family members are not interested in passing family history onto future generations. Some Milford family organizations listed below are in need of help to continue running.

DNA testing can verify paper documents but expect errors if it is performed with less than 60 genetic markers or produce results dating from a thousand years ago. Nonetheless it can be fun to get the range of where your family traveled.

In addition to the monthly Genealogy meetings held at the Milford Public Library on the first Monday of each month at 1:00 PM, these people and resources can be contacted if you are interested in learning more about your family's history.