DAR

If you had an ancestor who was born between 1715-1767 in the American Colonies, there is a good chance that they served in the Revolutionary War. The Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) is a lineage society you can join if you have ancestors that served in the American Revolution. Applicants need to prove through documentation that they are a direct descendant of that ancestor. It is this proof documentation that makes the DAR an essential resource for your family history and is available to nonmembers to purchase as a download.

Documentation can be personal letters, pages from Bibles, obituaries, etc. and is scrutinized by professional genealogists for accuracy. Legacy Family Tree Webinars recently had an excellent webinar on the DAR by Rick Sayre. Sayre mentioned in this webinar that there are 205 new members added to DAR each week and 55 NEW patriots added each month. That is a lot of documentation proving ancestry for new members. There are also 7,100,000 descendants listed in this database.

On the DAR home page (ww.dar.org), you need to:

· Click on the green GRS tab at the very top. This tab will take you to their Genealogical Research System. This system is up-to-date and replaces the DAR index books.

· After you enter the GRS system, you need to click on the Ancestor tab. This tab will take you to a search page where there is a search box to search for ancestors. Even though there are red asterisks that indicate you must have information in a field, I was still able to search with just a last name.

I choose an ancestor’s last name of Sleeper and found fourteen different Sleepers listed. I chose my ancestor David Sleeper and found that around forty of his descendants had joined the DAR using his Revolutionary War Service. On this page is the column Nat’l Num. This is the DAR member number. The larger the number, the more accurate the documentation. I clicked on member 919051, and for $30 I can get both the lineage and the ten pages of documentation used to prove this lineage to downloaded to my computer. On the Bible tab by the Ancestor tab, I found that someone had used a page from David Sleeper’s Bible to prove their relationship. I can also purchase a copy of this page.

Don’t overlook this underused resource to aid you in expanding your family history!