Whether you celebrate Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa or even Festivus, family get-togethers over the holidays are a great time to gather information and learn about your genealogy.

As an amateur genealogist since 2000, I haven’t been researching my family lineage very long — at least not compared to how far back I’ve been able to trace it.

My interest in family history probably dates back to a class project I had done in grade school. Fortunately, my mom had started the process, collecting information about herself and my dad, their parents and their grandparents. Just the basics: dates and places of births, marriages and deaths, along with lists of their children, their spouses and their children.

I was lucky. A lot of the information my mom found had come from the pages of a family Bible on which my great-grandmother had kept meticulous records of all her descendants.

So when my interest began in earnest as a junior in high school, I already had access to a pretty decent starting point.

Among the stories I discovered were those of a great-great-grandfather who had ridden the rails halfway across the country in search of his high school sweetheart; a 4x-great-grandfather who had owned the barn that authorities had burned to the ground in order to smoke out a presidential assassin; and a 10x-great-grandfather who had hidden the sixth and final wife of a king who had opted to kill his wives rather than divorce them.