Easy Steps to Start Your Genealogy

Genealogy, often misspelled as geneology, is the study of someone’s heritage and recording their lineage. Researching your ancestry is detective work. Finding that one source that helps us go one generation deeper, or helps to uncover a new family fact is very rewarding. To get started with discovering your heritage, follow these steps:

Start with what You Know
Record vital information for yourself, your parents, and siblings. This includes events like: birth, marriage, death, graduations, military service, residence, stories, pictures, and everything that can be found. Once you gather all this data, look for documents that would back-up the events. Documents are sources. Sources both oral and written provide the proof that the events did happen. Organizing, assembling, analyzing, and creating next steps for all the documents gathered can be overwhelming, especially as you start to add more information and more family members. Genealogy programs will organize your information. They allow users to attach documents and media files to multiple people. Programs make it easy to change and add information to your family genealogy.

Interview Your Relatives
As a next step, reach out to relatives. Parents and grandparents are often helpful with heritage and folklore. Interview all your living relatives. Talking with aunts, uncles, cousins, and close friends can produce pictures, documents, and stories. Not only will you learn about your ancestors, but you may learn something new about your living relatives.

When you speak with each person, it is important to ask questions that don’t just focus on when and where births and deaths occurred. A good genealogy is more than just dates and places. Try learning about the personalities of your ancestors, and what their lives were like. It is important to relax and take time when interviewing relatives to learn as much as possible. You may find the questions will uncover new parts of your ancestry.

Gather Family Genealogy Details
You may or may not have relatives that can help with your heritage quest. Even if you do, how much do they remember? What do they have to share? Don’t rely solely on stories. Genealogists should back up their ancestry with documents to support their heritage. Find various genealogy records like: social security, death records, census records, obituaries, birth announcements, family letters, wills, etc. Documented sources help a genealogist build a reliable tree. Using a variety of sources helps to build a solid family history.

Although scouring the Internet can be a fast way to find data, the information turned up may not always be the most reliable. Beware of databases, indexes, trees and documents that are found on the internet. Verify all documents that are not original sources, before adding them to a family tree. Sources that are not original may have errors as the person doing the copying and typing can make mistakes.

Record Relationships and Kinship
Finding the right historical records to establish biological kinship is essential to building a reliable family genealogy. Ideally original records are the best, since the data within those sources is ideally primary or first-hand information, and evidence can be drawn directly or indirectly from them. In many instances, genealogists must skillfully assemble indirect or circumstantial evidence to build a case for identity and kinship. All evidence and conclusions, together with the documentation that supports them, is then assembled to create a cohesive family genealogy.

Get Organized, Stay Focused
Create a task list for your family genealogy. Add as much detail as possible with what is known and what has already been tried. Research takes many years and there will be times you get busy with other things and your hobby will be put on the back burner. If you created and maintained a task and research list it will be easy to pick up where you left off; it will save you from redoing research that was already done.

When planning a trip to a historical society or library find out as much as possible before making the trip. Know the hours of operation, what records they have, and plan for what you want to accomplish. Time might be limited so make the most out of your visit. When looking through books and films, take the time to record everything, stay organized, and stay focused. Upon returning home, you will be better prepared to analyze and evaluate the data.

Another reason to write down the source details is so you can easily attain the source again. We all run into issues where we need to reference the original document. If the data gathered doesn’t make sense, what is copied may end up as erroneous data. Worse than that, is if you get home and try to sort through your notes and copies and can’t make heads or tails of the information. The time and money spent might not yield the same results as being organized and staying focused. Building a solid family genealogy with sources requires many hours of research. Some search efforts will help further your genealogy and some will not. Documenting all findings, whether successful or not, will help to pave new search ideas as well as keep you from doing the same research again in the future.

Share with Family
Keep your relatives up to date on all of your discoveries. An online genealogy tree is a great way to easily share your results. Adding new details to a family tree may help jog the memories of your relatives and reveal more personal heritage. Relatives have many stories to tell. Treasure the information you find and keep it alive by sharing it with future generations.