3 Tips for Getting Started on Your Family History

There is a wealth of information and help available on the internet for researching family history. So much in fact that it can overwhelm you when you are just beginning. However, three simple questions will help focus your first steps and give you a successful and satisfying experience. Let me share some resources my wife and I used as we found out about her father's family. They can help you get started on your own search.

What Do I Already Know About My Family?

The best place to start on any task is where you are. Do you know the full names of your father and mother (maiden name)? Where they were born? When? How about the names of their parents and where they were born? Rather than tackling them all at once, pick one.

My wife's father was from Alabama and joined the Army at 17 during World War II, then married and settled in the West where she was born and raised. Although my wife knew some family stories and names, and had even visited her father's mother as a very young girl, there was virtually no contact with the extended family and her father left shortly after we were married and was completely incommunicado with the family until just before he passed away about four years ago. So we had very little to go on.

Here are four places to start if all you have is a name.

For deceased persons in the U.S. check out the Social Security Death Index. With just a name and knowing about when and where the person might have been when they died, you can locate the record of the person's death kept by the Social Security Administration. It includes the person's birth date and the county of their last residence. You can also order a copy of the record if you would like to have one.

Another step we took at the beginning of our search was to check out her father's surname on message boards like those listed at Genealogy.com, but there is often a lot to sift through. Hopefully you have some specific information like birthdates and locations to filter your search results.

The LDS church is famous for its family history resources, many of which are free and online. We put her father's name into their Family Search web page to see what turned up there. If you want some local help, there are family history centers scattered around the world staffed by knowledgeable volunteers. To find one near you, use the Find a Family History Center search.

Next we used Ancestry.com and found vital records (birth, marriage and death), census information and military records for her father. Although you can search for names and see what information is available about a person for free, you must sign up and pay to view the source records and save copies. Fortunately Ancestry has a quarterly plan as well as an alternative to the hefty annual fee. We found it best for our wallet to go for three-months to begin with, which gave us access long enough to get information to use with other (free) resources. We now knew where her father was living in 1930 and what his siblings and parents names were from the census, we found a birth record, his death certificate and some information about his military enlistment (his mother signed a release for him to enter the military "under age").

What Do I Want to Find Out About My Family?

People have many different reasons for researching their family history. To begin with perhaps you just want to know where your family came from. But as you gather dates and places eventually you will be drawn to wanting more. Because there are so many sources to check out, decide what things you would like to know. It can be fairly easy to locate basic vital record information, but you should be prepared to spend more time and broader search strategies if you want to get a feel for what it was like where they lived in the period they lived there.

After locating my wife's father in Etowah County, Alabama in the 1930 census, we went to the USGenWeb Project pages to see what else we could find. The USGenWeb Project has the stated mission of keeping family history research on the internet free. To use it, you select the state you want to look in from the main page then choose the county to view records that volunteers have made available.

Because this project is a completely volunteer effort, what you will find available varies from county to county. There may be nothing at all, but we visited some county pages with amazing stores of not only public records like wills and land deeds, but local family histories and biographies of past citizens, cemetery and church records, obituaries from newspapers, and pictures of people and places. If your family search takes you outside the US, checkout the WorldGenWeb pages.

We found a lot of good background information about Etowah County and also discovered that parts of Etowah County have been in surrounding counties in the past, giving us more places to look for research leads. As you get further into your family history research, you will come to realize that more leads is always a good thing.

Where Do I Go for More Information?

We used some other resources in digging deeper into my wife's father's history, and some we have not yet tackled.

The Roots Web Surname List has nearly 1 million surnames that have been submitted by people doing family history. Like Ancestry.com, there is a registration fee to get full access, but you can locate a good deal using the free trial. (Roots Web is operated by the same company as Ancestry and you will find that many searches for vital records information lead back to other faces of this organization.) However, is free to add your surname to the Roots Web list so that others who are interested in your family name can find you. Armed with the information we gathered on Ancestry and the USGenWeb pages, we were able make better use of the message boards and found cousins and more distant relatives. Some of my wife's new-found family had done a great deal of research and were happy to share it with us. This way we picked up some photos and learned some tantalizing stories about a possible Cherokee Indian ancestor in her dad's otherwise solid Scots-Irish line.

If you plan to collect and distribute or publish to other family members what you find, you are going to want to spend time looking into family history software. I recommend going to Cyndi's List of Genealogy Software and checking out some of those products. There are even free and shareware programs listed there.

If you'd like a book to help you out, check out this article on MSNBC, Assembling the Family History Puzzle, by Matthew and April Leigh Helm, authors of "Genealogy Online for Dummies".

Warning, once you get started, it is easy to become addicted. Family history research is one of the most popular uses of the internet.