Your family’s health history could be in your genealogy

One of the benefits of doing your family history is to learn more about your family’s health history. While some health issues are environmentally linked, others could be anticipated by knowing more about your recent ancestors and what they might have had. Knowing what runs in a family is always worth asking older family members.

In my family I knew that my Dad and several of his siblings had diabetes, so it was no surprise when I was diagnosed. I later learned that their aunt had died of it in 1925, their grandmother had it, and so forth. Besides diseases, one can often track family characteristics, learning who might have had red hair that was passed on down. Twins run in some families, and my great grandmother was a twin, born in the 1870s, and while no one who knew her and her sister later in life thought they were identical, several photographs have turned up showing that they were identical and dressed alike into their teen years.

So it's worth asking your relatives what they know about any health history so you can write it down and pass it on to future generations. With families spread all over the country now, people are not growing up surrounded by aunts, uncles and cousins, but they still need to know their health history. Search online for "family health history" or the government's "Family Health History Portrait" from the Surgeon General to see some questions to ask and forms to use. Searching for "Know Your Family Health History" leads to some great links and forms at FamilySearch.org that can help one learn more about what to ask and how to record the same.