Find My Family History

To start your family tree, it is pretty easy to start off with your immediate family and work your way back probably to your grandparents. To fill in all the details like their date of birth, death, and marriage dates, you can easily ask your parents or search through family albums to find out.

If your parents do not know and you do not have records, these can normally be found by doing some digging in the area where your grandparents lived. You could probably find hospital records, speak to local retirement homes and more.

Sometimes your local Archives office will have the information that you need. Just by looking online, you can access your Title Deeds office and search for your grandparents names on their database if they owned a home. Some of these websites will require payment.

When you complete your family tree, you will not simply go backwards through your family in a straight line. Remember that you will branch out from your immediate family into your grandparents' siblings and their marriages, their children and so on.

Genealogy will comprise of all your distant relatives, so this information is important to get in as much detail as possible. To access this information, you can also do it the old fashioned way and find your distant relatives such as cousins, who can give you information and show you photos of their parents and grandparents. Who knows, they could have some interesting photos and information that you might not have!

Take a look at this useful guide to Setting Up A Family History Interview with Family Members.

When you start out looking into your genealogy, it is important to keep detailed notes and records. Remember that you are now a record keeper yourself, and to complete your family tree in detail. You need to ensure that your notes are accurate, complete and detailed enough, so that if there are problems or instances where you might find two pieces of conflicting information, that you can piece together the puzzle correctly.

Keeping a file of information and records is vital to completing your family tree. Collect photographs, make copies of all the records that you find at the Archives, print out any information that you find online and keep it all.

Also keep in mind that some of these documents will be very old, and sometimes they can be hard to read. It is always helpful to take a magnifying glass with you. Certain Archives offices will charge you to make copies of the documents you want to keep,. But if you are struggling to find the connections and have a large number, it is a better idea to take photographs with a high quality camera that you can then analyze further at home and even enhance using special computer software.

Aside from keeping hard copies of everything, which can take up a lot of space when you get really far back into your family heritage, you can also just keep digital records using genealogy software or even by starting your own family tree or genealogy website.

There are also certain genealogy websites that are created with the specific purpose of providing people with a storage facility and platform so that they can list their information and create their family tree. If you collect photographs of all the important documents and scan photos onto your computer, you won't need to create a huge, cumbersome filing system.