How to Get Started With Your Family Tree…

We’re all complex individuals and this is because we are a mixture of so many people, our ancestors. Many of us know our parents, our grandparents and if we’re really lucky we may know great grandparents. We look like some of them, we act like some of them, we may even have entered the same profession, but what about the ancestors we never met?

This is what genealogy is all about, finding out where we came from and meeting through records and stories the people we descend from who may have died decades, even centuries before we were born. It’s not an easy hobby but it’s rewarding and interesting. It also gives you a chance to talk to your loved ones and share stories of the past.

So, how do you get started creating a family tree?

Start With Yourself:

As you are going to be the base of your personal family tree it only makes sense to start with yourself. Who knows you better than you know yourself? Write down everything you know about yourself, all the important dates - your birth date, your spouse’s, birth date, your children's birth dates. Include your wedding date and any other important life events that define you and your most immediate family.

Talk to the Elders:

You probably know your parents’ dates of birth and where they were born but it’s always worth giving them a little interview in case you are misremembering. Ask them about where they grew up, ask them about their siblings, their memories of aunts and uncles and of course their own parents.

If you have living grandparents, go visit them or call them up on the phone and ask them all the same things as you asked your parents. Find out who their parents were, where they came from and whether they have siblings. Listen and take notes. Pay special attention to old family stories, these can be goldmines for clues in later research.

Start Building Your Tree:

Once you have gathered all the family history you can from the older members of your family it’s time to start building the tree. If you use a family tree creation website such as Ancestry.com you will be walked through this process. You can, however, start out with an offline tree just to plot out your initial findings.

Start with the youngest generation of your tree and begin at the bottom of your page. Create squares into which you will write the person's name, date of birth and place of birth. If this person is deceased write their date and place of death as well. Next, create vertical lines to connect the children to their two parents (father on the left, mother on the right) and input the same details for them. Using horizontal lines you can add the parents' siblings to the side of them with the oldest being on the left and the youngest to the right. Once this generation is complete, move up from the parents to the grandparents.

Start Your Research:

You now have a visual representation of the base of your family tree with the important details you will need to search for the records of your ancestors. In later posts we will talk about research methods and available sources you can use.