We’ve been working on our family history for many years now, and had a good start from the information given to us by Walt’s mom and her cousin Leonard Brune. But what if you are starting from scratch? Then start with you!
Some of the first questions to ask is “How do I want to use the information? Is it just for myself? Do I want to share it with other family members? Do I want to share it with the world?” The answer to these questions may help you decide how you want to record your work. If it’s just for you, writing it out is an option. If you want to share it, you should look at some of the many options out there for that.
Keeping track of people
There are charts that can be used to record your information. Ancestry has free ones you can download, such as this one which is used to list basic information about people. You can also sign up for a free account on the National Genealogical Society website and download their charts. The NGS charts are fillable PDFs, so you can have family fill them in and send them to you.
Some websites offer free accounts where you can record your information. Ancestry has the ability to have a tree on their site without paying a subscription. You cannot access all of their resources with a free account, but it does give you a way to track information. Ancestry trees can be public or private. Anyone under the age of 100 who does not have a death date is considered to be living and their information is private even if the tree is public.
There are software programs like Family Tree Maker, which is what I use. These programs let you keep the tree on your own computer and work on them whether or not you have access to the internet. This gives you complete control over who sees the tree. You can share reports from these programs with other people.
Start recording what you know
A family tree has to start somewhere. You can start with anyone but most people start with themselves. Add your parents and grandparents. Do you know birthdays, weddings, where they lived? Any information you have is going to help you add more to your tree. In the sample from FTM above, we started with Georgie and Carl. We then filled in as much as we could about their parents and grandparents. We knew where they lived, so that let us search local records for census data or marriage records.
As we could, we filled in spouses, siblings, and children. We found things like this marriage record for Leonard Brune’s brother Aloysius. This led to information about his wife and her family. I wrote about her here.
The next step to take is to ask questions. Talk to your relatives and see what they know. “Tell me about your aunts and uncles.” “What do you remember about growing up in West Point?” Take notes of the stories they tell. Ask about pictures they have of family. “Who are these people? What do you know about them?”
Where do I go from here
Once you have as much data as you can from your own knowledge and others in your family, it’s time to start filling in the gaps. You get to decide how much you want to do and who you want to include. I am a bit of a generalist in that I like to add shirt-tail relations. Often times I find connections that I wasn’t aware of as I add more people. Some people only focus on direct lines and don’t add much on side branches or spouse’s families.
Ancestry and the National Genealogy Society have a lot of free resources about doing family history research. There are a number for free resources online and a list of some of them can be found here. Get excited about filling in your own family tree.
I’ve written a fair amount about the research process. You can find all of those posts by searching on the ‘genealogy research’ tag or just clicking this link.
As always, I have no affiliation with the programs and resources listed above, but hope you will find this information useful.
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