DNA testing only reveals part of your story.

Climbing the limbs of your family tree or poking around at the trunk to find your roots has never been easier or, increasingly, without the risk of uncovering a family secret or two. With an accumulating trove of digital data available online and mail-in DNA testing services providing more details, family researchers have a boundless supply of sources for finding their branches and roots.

But DNA genetics testing only goes so far. The genetic code, fascinating as it is, doesn’t tell family stories.

“You never know what you’re going to find if you start looking. You’re going to find something interesting,” says professional genealogist Bill Eddleman, research coordinator at the State Historical Society of Missouri’s Cape Girardeau Research Center. “But you need the story behind it. And that’s what the paper trail does.”

In other words, nothing beats good old-fashioned research and detective work, whether that’s combing through the State Historical Society of Missouri research library at the Center for Missouri Studies at 605 Elm St. in downtown Columbia, which has the world’s largest collection of Missouri newspapers — some of which is digitized — or diving into extensive family histories and other documents via a mouse click. SHSMO has subscriptions to the nation’s top genealogy databases – ancestry.com, for instance — that are free for on-site public use.  

Whether someone is a genealogy…