New to Genealogy?
2. Getting Started - General Research Advice
Your best bet is to start with what you already know. This is your own knowledge of your immediate family. Write down all the family members that you are aware of, their dates and places of birth, marriage and death along with their occupations and where they lived. Also make a note of the relationship between all these family members so that you have a clear picture of your known family. At this point, it is likely that you will find gaps in your knowledge (particularly with dates and middle names). This can be sorted out later.
As well as making notes on individuals, try sketching the structure of your family tree as illustrated below.
This will help you to organise your findings.
A few basic guidelines:
- Keep everyone from the same generation on the same horizontal line.
- Draw your tree with the youngest generation at the bottom, working your way up with each successive generation.
- Expect to have to redraw your sketch several times - it's not easy to get right first time!
Try to keep your notes organised. It is relatively easy to find things when you first start out, but as your pool of information grows, an organised approach pays dividends.
Talk To Your Relatives
Having exhausted your own knowledge, it is time to talk to your relatives. They are a valuable source of information which is often also anecdotal and therefore will give you a better picture of the life of your ancestors than you can get from more formal documentation. They may be able to provide you with family documents, photographs, letters, birth, marriage or death certificates and newspaper cuttings and a wide range of other memorabilia.
Before you go too far with your research, it is worth asking relatives if they know of anyone else who has already done any research into your family history. While it is satisfying to do things for yourself, you may find that there is already something worthwhile to build on (although you should check previous research to make sure that it is reliable). Even if someone has already carried out a significant amount of research, it is likely that you can now take this further. The amount of information that is being made readily available for research is increasing by the day, particularly via the internet.
If you intend to speak to a relative about your family history, give them some advance warning as this will allow them time to think about the sort of information you might be after and maybe collect together things that may be of interest.
Initial Fact Finding
While it is pleasant to be able to spend time with your relatives and share their memories, you should try to ensure that you achieve what you set out to do - gain as many facts as possible.
The following is a list of the sort of information you should be aiming to collect from your relative:
- Your relative's full name
- Their date and place of birth
- Any occupations they have been involved in; where and between what dates
- Addresses they have lived at
- Date and place of marriage(s)
- Religion
You should also be aiming to collection the same information about the following people linked to your relative:
- Wife or husband
- Children
- Parents
Where appropriate, also collect:
- Date and place of death
- Date and place of burial
Additionally, try to obtain as much information about any more distant relatives they know about.
Into The Unknown
By the time you have spoken to all of your relatives, you are probably running out of information you can collect on a personal level. It is therefore time to explore further afield using the documentation collected outside the family i.e. public records.
The use of public records is covered in the next section.
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