I have been interested in my family tree, and I have asked an administrative scrivener who specializes in researching family trees to investigate my family tree.

What they do is simply retrieve family registries of my family from city halls as much as they can, and then put them in a tree. I thought I was going to do it by myself, but then I learned there were a couple of special skills that professionals have but I don't. New registries are done in computers, so that it's much easier to read them. However, older ones are hand-written, and I won't be able to read everything.  It will cause me to be missing some traceable trees, and my tree won't be as complete as it would have been done by a professional. Time was also important. They know how to ask city halls to get what they need at once, but it'd take me forever or very many times to get all the docs. A withdrawals register record may be kept up to 80 years, and I may fail to obtain some records if I spend too much time. I wish I have done this 20 years ago or so.

Anyway, they gave us an interim status update. And surprisingly they found an ancient of mine who was born in year 1809. It's almost 200 years ago, and it's the sixth generation above me.

For the moment, I have asked them to investigate 4 branches which are my father's, my mother's, my spouse's father's, and my spouse's father's trees. By default, they go after male trees.  I am thinking of adding 4 more braches to my research order, and it will add my father's mother's, my mother's mother's, my spouse's father's mother's, and my spouse's mother's mother's trees.  After that, I might add 8 more, but I am not sure if I'd go ever even any further.

Also, to support this effort in parallel, I am investigating on my family emblem. It has to do with "rice", and I am trying to find a book which has my emblem. In the process, I found there are about 143 major emblems for the Suzukis, and I listed them on http://www.belltree.org/.  Sorry it's currently only in Japanese. However, you can see the actual designs by going to http://www.belltree.org/perpref.asp. I am still missing some of them, and I might have to go back to the library again to get non-digital copies of them.

Some of 143 emblems have "rice" design on them, but none of them are mine. I then found a book that listed at least over 200 variations of "rice" emblems. Unfortunately, they still didn't include my "rice" emblem. I am wondering where I can find it. I might have to go to a funeral hall and they might have one. These emblems tend to be used at funerals, and they might be a good bet.  I know my emblem exists since my mother has some formal Japanese Kimonos that have the emblems on them.

My hope is that someone comes to the website and find the same emblem as mine, and it might discover some unknown relatives.