Researching Your Family Tree
It’s hard to say that people get into genealogy and the desire to research and create their own family tree for any one specific reason.
Many will tell you that it’s the same as any other hobby – collecting stamps, old typewriters, only this time, it has a direct link to who they are. There are the theoretically quoted reasons of course: people want to know where they are descended from, who they are and how they got where they are today.
Whatever the case, it seems that many who start on the pursuit of finding out about their family over the generations have gone on to finding it very hard to stop – researching your family tree is the most rewarding of hobbies because it just keeps opening up new horizons leading you new discoveries. The best thing of all is that it is a hobby that you can share with your family! Search Billions of Names at Ancestry.com
There are scientific reasons for the study of family trees and genealogy, and they are usually linked to improving the quality of life we live today. Tracing a disease that has run through a family for hundreds of years may help to find a cure. Tracing the history of families that live long lives may point to where this started – how they got to have a gene of longevity. Whichever way genealogy and the study of family histories is looked at, it is an enriching way of studying history.
If you want to create your own family tree, where do you start?
It is an often asked question; the way life is today, it’s hard to find a relative who knows more than 2 or 3 generations back. There are recommended tracks to follow though, which will get you started. Once you get started on these tracks, you will find more and more ways to gather information, and you will have a relatively deep family tree by the end of it.
1. You need to realize before you embark on this that it’s always a work in progress and can become a very consuming affair. The more you know, the more you will want to know and the more there is to know. It will require persistence and dedication on your part for you to come up with a comprehensive tree.
2. Start with what you have, because you can get great tips from there for moving your project forward. What you have is your mom, dad, grandma, grandpa, your older brothers, sisters and cousins. They have memories of relatives that you don’t, and they may know how you can find them. Your parents’ siblings are also instrumental in getting started – old aunties and uncles are usually an unbeatable source of information about relatives from long ago.
3. Now you have a kind of list. You can move your search online, and it’s getting more and more exciting with every step. There are numerous online resources – software and databases – that will guide you. You need both. The software will help you get the structure of the family tree up. There are people who might opt to do it offline, but can you imagine how exciting it can be to put your tree up online and have relatives you didn’t know find you? It’s a great way to make great strides in growing your tree. It’s also a little favour you’re doing the coming generations – you have given them perfect online documentation of your family tree. Databases will help you trace even more relatives.
4. Your online work will be supplemented by archives. There are records of births, deaths, marriages, business registrations and many more in government archives. It’s a world of information, and it can be tedious. Make time and remember that it will take more than one or two visits for you to make headway. It’s a wise thing to always call ahead and ask if they can send you an index of some sort so that you are not on a wild goose chase.
5. As you find out more and more people in your family line, add them to your tree.
You are well on your way if you have gone that far. You will keep on finding out more and more about your family. Information may find its way to you – an old relative remembers something that supplies you with 4 or 5 branches; how exciting is that?
A family tree is a skeleton, but it’s the only way to get started so that you can move on to write a family history. It will rarely work on its own because it’s just a bunch of names, but from within it, you will unearth rich, beautiful stories about the people behind all those names.
You will discover just how you came to be you!
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