How to Start Researching Your Genealogy

Keep in mind when creating your family tree, it is more than just dates and places. Finding family documents, photos, wills, probates, deeds, marriage certificates, military, birth, death and census records are important. They validate your family history and bring your family tree to life.

Genealogy research can be a fun family event. Getting everyone involved with gathering photos, documents, and family stories can help bring your family together by spending time discussing and sharing your findings. You can also find other researchers through genealogy boards and forums that are willing to give you hints and tips and even do research look-ups for you.

Genealogy Research Planning
Before you get buried with information; you should decide what type of information and documents you are looking for. This can help you keep focused on what you need to search for. Then you can devise a research plan. Being organized and knowing as much as you can about the area your ancestor lived in and what documents are available for the time period you are trying to discover/uncover will help you immensely in tracing your family tree.

Documenting Your Genealogy Research
If you can only find one document you should include a narrative of why you think this one document is proof for your family. If you can't find any documents, you should still write a narrative as to why you think someone belongs in your family tree.

While doing genealogy research you will get stuck looking for a document to substantiate a fact. This is known as hitting a brick wall. When this happens, you will most likely go onto a different family member and eventually return to the task you started years ago. If you do not document your research, you will end up starting from scratch and redoing the same search over and over again, creating a cycle of brick walls.

Organizing Your Genealogy Research
You should set up a filing system to organize your findings before you get consumed with lots of information and documents. There are several options to setting up a filing system to organize your findings and assembling your family tree documents. You can file your documents by year, alphabetically, or by setting up folders for direct family members. Your genealogy research will produce many documents. You may want to set up 4 main files for each direct grandparent and file all your findings by year, then alphabetically for each direct family member within the 4 main files. Putting all similar documents in color coded folders filed by year alphabetically is another option.

What ever your organization preference is, folders, notebooks, boxes, large envelopes, etc., be consistent with your filing system. Scanning all your documents and adding them to your family tree will help keep your genealogy research organized. Make sure you have a back-up of all your information. You can lose your data if your computer crashes, as well as if you have a natural disaster hit your home. Having an external recovery plan is always a good idea.