Beginners Guide to Researching Your Family Tree

Researching a family tree is a daunting prospect for most people. With all the avenues available to help a researcher, it can be very overwhelming, as well as expensive. Here are some ways you can begin to assemble the keys to your past, and the only real expense is going to be your time.

Getting Started

The easiest way to start piecing together the past is you and your relatives' knowledge. Start by making up some charts or buy specially printed family group sheets. You will need separate sheets for each family group.

You are going to need names, places and dates. Start with you, your spouse and children. Record your full name, date and place of birth and your parents' full names. Then do this for your spouse. Add in your marriage date and place. Then record the data for each of your children. If your children are married, you'll need to create family sheets for them and their family as noted above.

Now you're ready to move back a generation to your parents. Record all their data, and remember their parents' full names. And then record all their children, and remember this includes you! Again, you must create separate family sheets for your siblings. You can also do the same for your spouse's parents and siblings. You might want to only do a direct lineage at this time and go back later and fill in sheets for extended family.

Talk to your family members about the past. You'd be amazed at the information that they can give you. Use documentation you have right under your nose - family bibles, title deeds, birth and death certificates and baptismal papers, among others. These are great sources and are excellent sources to prove lineage.

Writer's Cramp

Are your fingers ready to fall off from all that writing? If so, then you might want to turn on your computer. There are a number of good family tree programs on the market that store all the data you put and add it in easy to read pages, they have good indexing and allow for easy importing and exporting of gedcoms. That brings us to perhaps the greatest invention in researching your family tree.

The Internet

This is probably the greatest research tool to ever come along. When I first began my research, I knew very little. But in just over a year, with a lot of learning and plunging in the deep end of the Net, I had managed to trace most of my lines back to between 1400-1600, with one going back to to the Vikings!

There are many sites on the Net dealing with genealogy. A number of chruches have websites dedicated to geneaology. People have donated their gedcoms to these sites so that researchers might be able to find connections to their own families. The only downside to these sites is you can't be guaranteed that the information is 100% accurate, because there is no email available to the donor. However the sites are very user friendly and great for beginners.

Advice

My best piece of advice is to verify all the data you get. This can be very time consuming, but it is the only way to be sure all your information is correct. You can do this by gathering documentation yourself, or by using other people as sources. Just be sure to give them the credit for the work. You can verify your data through official records from departments of vital statistics, churches, funeral homes, veteran and social security records, ship manifests and even tombstones. If you have lines of nobility or even royalty these lines are very well documented and sourced so a lot of the work is already done.

Genealogy is a wonderful hobby and can give you a wonderful feeling of the past. You never know who may turn up as a leaf on your family tree.