Wondering how to get started with genealogy?

There are so many free and paid ways to search for your family tree that it can become confusing fast. Don’t worry, there are some simple rules genealogists follow that will help you.

The suggestions I’m giving below come from experience and study. Even if you are “not too serious” about family history research, you’ll still want to follow solid methods for getting it done. Otherwise, I’m afraid you will learn that “Garbage In, Garbage Out” doesn’t just refer to computer programming.

1. Make Record-Keeping a Priority

I know, this sounds pretty dull, but good record-keeping will save you a lot of time and aggravation.

Get a notebook, a paper notebook, and just like in grade school, put your name on it now. This will be your research journal. In it you will keep track of the places you looked for information, what you found, and what you are hoping to find.

Now, if you are already saying, “But I’m paperless! I do everything online!”, that’s fine. You can use a single document instead of a physical notebook. I would suggest just one document because programs like Word allow you to search a document quite easily. (If it gets way too long, start a new one each year, or each quarter, whatever suits you.)

The point of this notebook or document is to have a day-by-day account. You can organize your findings into reports, diagrams, anything you like.

I’m not going to explain here how to keep a research journal, but I think that’s something worth writing about, so I’ll come up with a nice post on it in future.

2. Start with Now

It’s best to start with what you know and work from that. For example, most people can name their parents, siblings, grandparents, and perhaps some aunts and uncles. Some can go a generation further back. After that it tends to get murky.

Start with the facts you are most sure of, rather than the iffy ones. Write down the main things you know about the people in your family, whether or not they are still alive.

Usually it is helpful to start with the most recent event (e.g. the death of an ancestor) and work backwards (e.g. to find the record of the same person’s marriage, then their birth), rather than to start with the birth of someone long ago and work forwards. This is not an iron-clad rule, it just fits with the practice of working from firm facts to discover less firm ones. When someone dies, their obituary can include details of their birth, but I don’t think many birth announcements can predict the full course of a life.

As you begin to compile your family tree, the standard advice is to interview your oldest relatives before they can no longer tell you about the family history. Try and get a copy of whatever work others have already done.

3. Be Gentle with Your Relatives

When you ask questions, make it easy for the person giving the answers. No one carries an encyclopedia of family history in their brain. You may find the same person gives you a different answer on different days, or that they may not want to talk about some parts of the past. Be kind.

If you have the opportunity to ask questions more than once, do so. A little bit at a time is often easier on both of you.

4. Get (or Make) Some Useful Forms

Whether you choose to keep your records and results in digital or paper form, you will soon find that there are lots of useful forms and formats available. No need to invent your own. Many are available free online. If you have a subscription to a service like Ancestry, you might end up storing your results in there. (There are pros and cons to this approach.)

Some of the basic forms I have found handy are:

• blank family tree chart with 3 or 5 generations
• family group sheets
• individual person pages.

Don’t worry if you don’t want to use all of these. Just pay attention to what information you are trying to capture, retrieve, and share. In the beginning, a simple family tree diagram might be all you need.

Keep your papers together, in a binder or file folder. They have an irritating way of dispersing if you aren’t careful.

5. Decide on a Goal

Genealogy is an extremely open-ended pursuit. It helps to state the goal, or scope, of your current project. That doesn’t mean you can’t do more research on different topics, but by stating your goal at the outset, you will know what is relevant and what is not.

A typical goal could be any of these:

• find all the descendants of a given person (e.g. your great-great-grandmother)
• find all the direct ancestors of a given person (e.g. yourself)
• find all available records pertaining to an individual.

There are other goals. For example, there is a whole world of One-Name Studies where people try and locate, record, and share all the places where the surname of interest appears in public records. Such studies can continue for decades and be the work of many individuals in collaboration.

6. Gather the Basic Information

There are certain fairly standard bits of information you’ll want to collect and include in your family tree. “Hatched, matched, dispatched” is a saying you might have heard. It’s a way to remember to get the particulars (date and place) for the birth, marriage(s), and death of each person in the family tree you are building.

Because I am very interested in how people lived, and in finding the places that were significant to them, I tend to look for a lot more than the basic BMD (Births, Marriages, Deaths) information. I make notes about other things, including addresses, occupations, places of work, churches and schools, and locations of burial if that’s available.

7. Where the Information Comes From

If you haven’t done any genealogy research before, you might be wondering where all the information comes from.

“It depends” is the answer. It depends where in the world your people lived (and died) and when.

The ocean of family history records has a few major streams flowing into it. Here are some of them.

Vital statistics records are where births, marriages, and deaths are usually collected and kept, until they hit a certain age (the records, not the people), after which they may be transferred to the official archives. These records, and the archives, tend to be kept by governments at the national, state, or provincial level.

Census records also tend to be government creations, and so do military records.

Church records of baptisms, marriages, and burials often go back further in time than government records do.

There is no guarantee that there will be a record in existence with the information you need, nor that you will be able to find it. However, every year, more and more records are digitized and put online. Some of them are free and some require you to pay.

8. How to Get Access to the Information

Knowing that information comes from many places isn’t very helpful if you don’t know how to find it.

Here are some common ways for getting genealogical information. I write this mainly thinking of the former British Empire and the U.S.A., though some of what is here also applies more generally.

Popular sources for family history as a hobby:

• Paid services where you have access to a large database of records and the ability to store your own research. The most well-known is probably Ancestry.com, but there are others. FindMyPast.co.uk is very popular and highly regarded.
• The free FamilySearch.org site, which also provides access to a large database of records and the ability to store your own research. You cannot delete your information from FamilySearch.org, as far as I can tell. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints owns this site. On the one hand, they share it freely and generously with the world. On the other hand, there is an expectation of mutual sharing, so whatever you contribute may end up being shared with others.
• Sites with free or paid records or indexes to records. The site Cyndi’s List (CyndisList.com) is a vast and growing index to many of these sources.
• FindAGrave.com is a free site with many transcriptions of MIs – Monumental Inscriptions. There are photos and transcriptions of many headstones. You can contribute information from your local cemetery if you want to help out fellow researchers.

This is just scratching the surface. An online search using your favourite search engine will also help.

9. Privacy is an Issue

From the start, be aware that privacy is important. One rule of thumb is not to disclose (in person or online) the name and dates of anyone who is still alive. You do not have to give information to anyone. Most people in the genealogy world understand this, and it’s rare that you will feel pressured. However, you may forget yourself, so I am emphasizing privacy now. Assume that what you tell someone today will be online tomorrow.

10. How to Really Get Started

Everything above might sound good, but you may still be wondering how to get started. Or, perhaps you got going and then hit what we call a brick wall. There is a piece of essential information you don’t have. What can you do?

First, resist the impulse to believe that a “fact” is true just because it might be true. I hate to burst anyone’s balloon, but the online world is full of incorrect family trees. Full. Your brick wall is not solved by pretending something is true just because you want it to be. Sorry.

To really get ahead in family history, try it on your own for a bit, read at least one how-to book, and join a local (or online) family history group. Because family history and genealogy is such a popular pastime, there are lots of groups you can join. From time to time, I’ve been a member of my local in-person family history society as well as joining distant groups in areas I was researching.

Having others to talk to helps a great deal.

If you have the chance to take an introductory course, do it. That’s what moved me from clueless to having a plan.

I know that a lot of people get an Ancestry.com subscription, and then immediately find it easy to fill in the blanks, and to create a tree almost instantly. Don’t get me wrong, I love using Ancestry, but if all you do is unquestionably accept the family trees that others have constructed, you are missing a lot of the fun and the learning that family history research can provide. You’re also at risk of getting it wrong.

Since my purpose on this website is to help people mix genealogy and travel, I really must stress that you have to start by getting the genealogy right. Unless you want to visit the wrong place, that is.

So, to recap:

• decide what your goal is
• keep notes of your goal and your research as you go along
• gather all the information available from your family and others (family friends may know more than you expect)
• put the information on a family tree diagram, and perhaps on other forms that you find helpful
• read how-to books, talk to other people who do family history, and visit the library for help and information
• take a course
• try different tactics to fill in the gaps on your tree
• be very cautious about accepting the truth of what you are told, especially family trees online.
  

Family history is fascinating for me, and I hope you will enjoy it too.

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