Researching Your Family History: A Guide for Beginners Getting Started

Researching your family history can be a challenging and time-consuming endeavor. However, the reward that comes with it is well worth the time and energy that you put into it. Unfortunately, most people are not sure where to start when they want to begin a genealogy project. However, if you do some key things and stick with it, you will begin to have a good knowledge of your family's history and some pretty good stories to go with it.

There are a few key steps that you want to take right away if you want to work on your family history, and most of them deal with getting organized. The first thing you want to do if find a program that can help you organize all of the information that you are gathering. While there are a lot of programs out there, most of them will charge you money. If you don't want to spend too much money off the bat, I would suggest going to Familysearch.org and download a free program called Personal Ancestral File. The program is free and there is no catch; you don't have to sign up for any newsletters or anything. The PAF file is a great way to organize your information. It can put together a family tree, a pedigree chart, books, ancestral charts, etc. The pedigree chart has been my favorite and it has helped me organize my family history.

Secondly, and quite possibly the most important aspect of your work, you must talk to your family! If you are lucky enough to still have grandparents alive or even great-grandparents, talk to them. They have a plethora of knowledge that will be invaluable to your research. Most of your grandparents will have information on their parents (marriage dates, birth dates, etc) as well as their grandparents. This was the case with my grandmother. She had a ton of information, but it was all in a suitcase with no organization to it. However, what she had was great. There were various funeral announcements, birth announcements and wedding announcements of different relatives that I would have had a difficult time finding without that information. Not only that, but the stories that I got from my grandparents were great. If nothing else, you will find out some great stories that you would never had expected before you started asking them.

The third area is the most time consuming: research. Now, saying that researching your family history will take a lot of time is an understatement. The biggest thing you need to do is not get frustrated! If you begin searching your family history, you must be prepared to have some failures. There are a plethora of sites that let you search. However, a lot of the 'professional' family history sites will charge you for the information. You can research and they will give you some information, but for the detailed info, you need to pay for it. However, there are some things that you can do to decrease this. First of all, if you are researching your family history and the information you are looking for is based in another country, find a database from that country. A lot of countries have free information that they have out there regarding the census, birth records, etc. However, you also usually get a free trial for the payment sites. The free trial can be useful because you can see if the information that they have is worth spending the money on (plus you might find everything that you wanted on that site before the free trial is over).

Finally, a great resource is finding relatives that have done some research already. This has helped me in my research a lot. My great-great-grandmother on my mother's side (and her mother's side, and her mother's side) had the last name Kussell. A relative of mine who had that last name had done a lot of research on the Kussell name and found our ancestors that went back to the early 1800's. So, I didn't have to do a ton of research for that part of my family history. This has happened a couple of times. Also, you may have quite a few people from different parts of your family that have done some research. Find those long lost cousins and get their information, it speeds up the process quite a bit.

There are of course numerous sites, blogs and articles that go even more in-depth on doing research. This is just what I have found to be good help. Is it perfect? No. However, I have found out a lot more about my family history than I ever knew before, and I've been able to share that information with my immediate family as well as my cousins. It has been well worth the time. So, if you decide to get involved in researching your family history, great job! Good luck to all of you in your research.