How to Start Researching Your Family Tree
My Advice After 10 Years
We’ve all seen the ads in recent years for ancestry research and DNA tests. If you are interested in researching your family history, knowing where and how to start out may seem a little vague.
On and off, for over 10 years, I have been researching my family tree. In that time there have been helpful resources and others that are not so helpful. Here is what I would do and where I would go if I had to start all over again.
Interviewing People
The biggest help as you begin your journey is to prioritize primary sources over secondary sources. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you may be tempted to use a popular ancestry website to begin. While it may give you the pleasure and framework for doing things, you have few primary sources about the people you are researching. Additionally, you may have an ethical problem with your family’s history being public information.
The best primary source you will find are the people themselves, or their closest relatives and friends. Here you may ask something they possibly know about the person. This is the helpful stuff.
A census record may tell you where your grandfather lived and what trade he was occupied at in 1950, but a person may tell you a story, how they talked, how they dressed. In the end, you don’t care about the technical details, all you want to do is know the person.
This is the easiest method as well. All you have to do is either sit down with someone or make a phone call, grab a pen and notepad, and ask as many questions as you can think of.
Letters and Photographs
When you talk to people about researching your family tree, people will be more than willing to give you any artifact they may have from the person. The most common tends to be the most helpful: letters and photographs.
Letters are small fragments give great insight into the person: dates, places, people, conversational topics, writing proficiency, relationships, etc. Unlike other documents, these have already been verified for you by the person themself.
Last summer, I wrote on my experience and profound breakthrough in researching my grandfather because of his letters from World War II.
The cousin to a letter is a photograph. You get many of the same benefits with less spelling errors. You get to see the person that you are researching. In my case, I never met my grandfather, so without pictures I would not have a concrete conceptualization of what he looked like. They gave me the image of him in a place and time that I have never known.
Local Libraries, History Books, and Newspapers
Now we get to the best of secondary sources.
Local libraries are just that: local. They contain local people who know the area and where to go for more information. They may even know, or knew, the person you are researching. Then you are back to interviewing, which always prove supreme.
Local libraries also contain local history books, which are compiled and organized by locals who know the history and much about researching genealogies. Again, unlike online sources that are compiled by someone from Utah, they are generated and compiled by people from the same area.
The curators of the information are similar to the person you are researching; they know what things about local life are worth putting in and worth leaving out.
Below I have included an example of what one of these books looks like. They can easily be found on eBay if you’d like to get a copy of your own.
In the front they may contain a blank family tree that you can fill out along the way to keep you story. Inside they contain local histories, stories, and families. This has been a great resource for me when I share stories from my county.
The last of the great secondary sources that I have found are newspapers. While they may not provide in-depth biographical information, they will, however, give details of important enough events. It is bird’s eye view resource. All of the other resources mentioned previously are far better to use.
Conclusion
In-person research should always take precedence over online research. There are many helpful things online and many not so helpful. These are the best as they have created the greatest breakthroughs in my research and understanding of my family tree.