Every time you discover a new fact about an ancestor — date of birth, place of marriage, military service, overseas town of origin, migration route, cause of death — you come face to face with a real-life experience. Biographical facts don't occur out in space but rather in a real physical place at a particular moment in time. As a family historian, your goal is to situate the events of each ancestor's life in the real world in which they unfolded. Ask yourself: How is this birth different from all the other births in my family tree? What is distinctive about this wedding? How is this immigration story personal to this ancestor? The way to personalize a biographical event is to learn all you can about it and then consider where and when it happened — that is, examine it in light of local history!

One of the best places to find the local history that brings your ancestors' events to life is in a published history of the county where they lived. Here you can learn the politics, families, businesses, topography, occupations, climate, natural disasters, local customs and other aspects of the county's past. Unfortunately, though, many counties have no published history — at least, none bound together between the covers of one book. For example, there is no history of Issaquena County, Miss. But because ancestors of mine lived there, my search to understand their lives and activities revealed that sometimes historical context may be drawn from a variety of unlikely sources. Some of these sources may be familiar from your genealogy research, but you may be missing the local history that's hidden along with the names and dates.

Here are three ways you can extract hidden bits and pieces of local history and use them for the historical context of your ancestors' lives. These sources are readily accessible all over the country: