Biography writing is a challenge. It is even harder if that person has not been around for a while. Doing research on a person that affected your life that was not a relative and has been gone for a while is especially difficult. You have to become a detective of sorts. You are ferreting out details of that person’s life and trying to find someone alive who knew them personally. Famous people are pretty easy to do as they are memorialized in a newspaper, television, already have a biography and/or autobiography published or some even have a library of all of their papers available for research. Someone who was not greatly known but had an influence on your life and feelings should be remembered and is a lot harder. You can enlist the aid of a professional genealogy researcher but that will take some money. You can join a website like Ancestry.com but they charge as well. Of course, they have some FREE online videos and a course you can take that may help you in your research. They even have a listing for hiring researchers.
You can put the person’s name into a search engine and see if there is any information out there about the person you are researching. Most of the time you will just get a reference to the name from some other ancestry type website but occasionally you will get a newspaper reference such as an obituary that you can start with. The next place will be the Vital Statistics Department in the State and/or County where the person was born. You can pay to get a copy of the death certificate and if the persons birth date is past a certain year you can request a birth certificate without having to be an immediate family member. The fees are generally under $20 in most cases. If they were born in Florida, for instance, their birth date has to be over 100 years ago. Some schools are putting the school yearbooks online. If not available online you will need to contact the school’s librarian for an appointment to view the yearbook. This is when a cellphone with a decent camera will come in handy. You can snap photos of the pages and send them to your email. In some cases, you can copy the pages on a copier as well. But you can bet they will not have a color copying machine available. If this person has published any books or magazine articles your local library can give you access to the Library of Congress or other online libraries that may possess of a copy of their writings.
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