Genealogical research a lot like the detective work. All discoveries, big and small, can be rewarding. Sometimes you run into dead ends, but discipline will propel you forward. For some, the journey can be daunting (adoptees and human trafficking victims of war torn countries). Regardless of your situation, cultivating a long-view is recommended. Don’t expect answers for anything right away. It can also take a good amount of time to corroborate and verify the validity of documents. For some, language translation work will be necessary to decipher documents or travel to another country will be required to obtain family records.
While high-speed internet access has made genealogical research significantly easier and faster, a proper more methodical approach is recommended as you begin your efforts. This will pay dividends in the long run for those fortunate enough to have solids leads and clues to begin with and help avoid errors and time spent pursuing paths that may bear no fruit.
Though it is fun to do searches for family members, do not confuse searching with researching.
It is best to have a goal for a specific line of research. Determining a goal will help create a map for where you want to go with that research.
For example a good goal would be to build a family tree going back four generations. You can probably access a good amount of data from your immediate family members towards this end. This is a recommended place to begin.
Start to create an organized file system with your parents, and their parents. Many relevant documents may already exist in the family’s physical file cabinets. Yes, “old-school” physical papers! Birth certificates, marriage records and things like that. Make sure to get the complete full names of both maternal and paternal grandparents and great grandparent. For some people who have immigrated from other countries, it may be a challenge to get past the grandparents, but get there when you get there….
Keep a notebook. Write down everything you know about family members for the first 3-4 generations. You want as much information as you can to include dates and location names. After a first pass of this initial data collection, you can determine where there are gaps. For example, you may find that you have your paternal great grandfather’s name, but no record indicating the date or place of birth. So that becomes a research target.
At minimum, what you want for each person on the family tree is their full name, when and where they were born, married, and if applicable, when they died. If married, make sure to record maiden names. See tips here or here. If family members used nicknames, that could prove to be useful down the road as well, even though most of the time nicknames are not in official documents.
Have conversations with families. They may have records or things like old newspaper articles in their collections. They might now of historical information that you hadn’t yet been aware of. Perhaps someone else in your family has already done some genealogical research. Why waste time reinventing the wheel? Again, take notes!
Expand your circle of inquiry to close family friends, longtime neighbors and associates. Remember to note sources when you are taking notes, in case you need to verify, corroborate information or inquire further about what other know at a later time. Often, during research, questions pop up in your head that you hadn’t thought of during initial conversations with people. Also, try to find out if the information being given to you is from a first-hand witness position, or hearsay or just a rumor. Take notes of everything, as something that may seem unimportant initially, may prove to be connected to something important that you discover later.
Organizing your research is really important, especially as you begin to accumulate more and more data. You can organize things manually with a digital file structure and folders hierarchy, but today, there are many software applications available for this purpose that will make things easy, including creating backups of your research collections:
MyHeritage Family Tree Builder is freeware (not available for Apple)
RootsMagic is the most popular software used by genealogists and cost-effective
Ancestry.com has a subscription based plan, but you can try it out for 14 days for free
Mackiev Family Tree Maker is not cheap, but runs on both Windows and Apple
For beginners, we suggest taking a look at the free trial versions first and see which software suits your “style,” and matches your computer operating system. No need to rush into spending money before seeing what the products can do first.
Initially, just grab a paper notebook and pen, or a text document on your computer!
Once you gotten this initial research done, including conversations with family members and family friends, identify specific goals for individual family members (e.g. where were your maternal granparents born, and when/where did they get married, etc). Hop on over to some of the main genealogical research sites on the web and see what you can find!
Keep up your note taking at every step. Don’t forget to record citations for the source of any relevant documents you find!
SOME INITIAL RESEARCH SITES HERE.