Family Genealogy

Genealogy, often misspelled as geneology, is the study of your family history. Researching your ancestry can be very rewarding. Finding that one source that helps you go one generation deeper, or find a new fact is satisfying to us genealogy hunters. To help with your family genealogy quest to build a reliable family tree, 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 information, stories, pictures, and everything you can find. Once you gather all this information, you need to organize and assemble so you can make sense of the information. Creating Family Sheets and Pedigree Charts will help you see who you are missing from your family tree. Recording the information by hand can be time consuming and keeping the documents you have organized with each person can be overwhelming, especially as you start to add more information. Family genealogy programs help to organize your information. They allow users to attach sources 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, you should reach out to your family. Parents and grandparents are often good sources of information, but they should not be the only relatives who you should interview. Talking with your aunts, uncles, cousins, and close family friends can give you stories other than the ones you have been hearing for your entire life. Not only will you learn about your ancestors, but you may learn something new about your relatives who are still around today, too.

When you speak with each person, it is important to ask questions that don’t just focus on when births and deaths occurred. A good genealogy is more than just dates and places. You will want to learn about the personalities of your ancestors, and what their lives were like. It is important to relax and take your time when interviewing your relatives. You may find that the questions you ask will uncover parts of your ancestry that you never expected to find.

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

Although scouring the Internet can be a fast way to find the information that you need, the information you turn up may not always be the most reliable. Beware of databases, indexes, family trees and documents that are found on the internet. You should always verify documents you find that are not original sources, before you add them to your family tree. Sources that are not original may have mistakes, as the person doing the copying and typing, can make mistakes.

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 information within those sources is ideally primary or first-hand information, and evidence can be drawn, directly or indirectly, from those sources. 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.

Stay Organized, Stay Focused
create a task list for your family genealogy. Add as much detail as possible with what you know and what you have already tried. Research takes many years and there will be times you get busy with other things in your life and your hobby will be put on the back burner. So when you pick up where you left off, it will save you from redoing research you have already done.

When you plan a trip to a historical society or library, find out as much as you can before making the trip. Find out their hours of operation, what records they have, and plan for what you want to accomplish. Your time might be limited so you want to make the most out of your visit. If you copy information from books or microfilms, write down the source information, so you can easily find the information again, otherwise you might end up with information that doesn’t make any sense to you. 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 you spent, might not yield the results you could have had by staying organized and staying focused. Building a solid family genealogy with sources requires many hours of research. Some of your information found will help you to further your ancestry and some will not. Keep your task list current. Documenting your findings, whether successful or not, will help you in paving new search ideas as well as help you to not do the same research again in the future.

You should also remember to keep your relatives up to date on all of your discoveries. If you’ve created an online family tree, you can easily share your research with them over the Internet. As you add new information to your family tree, it may help jog the memories of your relatives and reveal more of your family heritage. Remember that your family has many stories to tell. Treasure the information you find and keep it alive by sharing it with future generations.