How can I learn more about my heritage?

You begin with yourself and you work your way backwards, one generation at a time: parents, grandparents, great grandparents, and so on. Start by talking to your family members - especially the older ones - and see what they can tell you about your family. Don't forget about your more distant relatives like great aunts & uncles and cousins, as they may have bits of the story that your immediate family doesn't know. For each ancestor, try to gather the following info:

Full name (maiden name for women)

Date and place of birth

Date and place of marriage

Date and place of death

And of course any details about their lives, jobs, personalities, adventures, etc.

Knowing when and where these major life events took place will help you find other information about their lives, their occupations, their personalities, etc.

Once you’ve gathered all the info your family can provide, you can look for records that will verify what you’ve been told, fill in the blanks, and take you back farther. No matter who your ancestors were, they did all sorts of things throughout their lives that resulted in some record being created: They got married, and their marriage was recorded at the county courthouse and perhaps in a church record. They had kids, generating birth certificates or baptism records. They bought and sold property, and paid their taxes. They had jobs, and perhaps applied for social security. They belonged to churches and clubs and social organizations. They may have joined the military or served in public office. If they were immigrants, their names might appear on a ship’s passenger list, or in immigration/naturalization papers. They filled out the census every 10 years, answering various questions about the people in their household. And when they died, they left wills, obituaries, death certificates, and cemetery records.

A lot of these records are still around; you can find them at county courthouses, libraries, archives, and various government agencies. Some (but definitely not all) are online. These records can tell you a lot about your ancestors’ lives, and give you clues about who their parents were and where they came from.

I've moved your question to the Genealogy section (under Arts & Humanities). There are a lot of very helpful and knowledgeable genealogists here, so this is a great place to ask if you need some guidance. If you do ask a question, be sure to include some details about the ancestor you're searching for: name, location, time frame, spouse and children. That will allow people to give you some specific suggestions about what records are available and where to find them.

In your case, the local library, and the one where your father's family was would be the first place I'd look. Most libraries have a local history shelf - or room.

The local newspapers on microfilm will have obituaries and wedding articles, both of which help. Obits come out 0 - 7 days after the death, wedding stories 0 - 3 days after the event. The local newspaper may have run other stories about your family, but, unless someone has indexed it, you'll go blind before you find them. By "Index" I mean a list of names with the date and page of the article about the named person.

County histories, too. I copy and paste this every once in a while:

From roughly the end of the Civil War until roughly 1920, several big publishing houses put out "Biographical and Pictorial History of --- County" books, where "---" was almost any county that had enough people to make such a work profitable. They evidently sent salesmen out with a form or a list of questions. Anyone who bought an advance copy was automatically qualified for the book. (Sort of like "Who's Who in American Accountants / Educators / High School Students" today)

Back in Chicago, New York or Philadelphia hack writers would embroider the facts with flowery phrases. Each man (99% of the leading citizens profiled were male, back then) got at least a column, sometimes more, and some bought pictures as well. Most counties had several books done. If your ancestor bought a biography, it can be pure gold. Each biography is part fluff and part meat, but the meat may have parents' names, siblings' names, spouse's name(s), children's names, birth place and dates for some or all, what he does for a living, when he came to the county, what religion, political party and fraternal order he belongs to, and more. If he served in the Civil War it will almost always say so, with rank, regiment and battles.

Google has some digitized. The county library of a given county will usually have a copy of most of the ones done for that county, in their local history collection, and sometimes neighboring counties. Ancestry.com has many of them digitized. Big libraries devoted to genealogy (Like the Sutro in San Francisco) have hundreds or thousands of them.

Here is a sample. I looked in Google Books just now and picked the first one in the search list for the three words "County Biographical History".

It was "Biographical history of Cloud County, Kansas: biographies of representative citizens. Illustrated with portraits of prominent people, cuts of homes, stock, etc." (Wilson, Humphrey & Co., 1903; 913 pages)

And, on page 300, a sample of the prose you find:

W. H. L. PEPPERELL.

Few men in Cloud county have risen from obscurity and gained the prominence accorded W. H. L. Pepperell. The interesting story of his life strikingly illustrates what a man can accomplish when he possesses ambition and the energy and the steadfastness of purpose to execute them. From poverty, a "little bootblack," as he is pleased to call himself, our subject has risen to prosperity, occupies a high standing as a citizen and is admired for the broad learning and scholarly attainments he has acquired —from where and when it would be difficult to determine exactly — for he began his career ere his school days had fairly dawned. But with the same determination that he has hewed down every obstacle in his path, he gained knowledge and acquired much of his book learning while in the employ of Mrs. Truesdell; furthermore it was of a practical kind, the quality that is a boon to the boy who turns pathfinder. . . .

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Saying their prose style was "lush" is like saying the Atlantic Ocean is wet.

You do the basic research like anyone else and you are correct families often tell you things and it is not proof and why should any family know very much about their ancestry as unless they have put in the time and effort to prove ad research it, it is mainly based on what they were told.

So you start with yourself and the records you already have at home and in the homes of your living relations as those prove ancestry and give you lots of additional information so you can go onto find ancestors further back. There is a list here of lots of records you can find in the home, all free and all waiting for you to research them http://familytimeline.webs.com/recordsinyourownhom...

As you are American you only have to prove back to 1940 as you can then start to look at census return to see family groups in the home and that will also inform you of race as they are indicated on the census but bearing in mine census records are very useful but are not primary records so you also need to look at other records like baptism, burials parish records to cross reference everything you find in your research.