Part 1
Your immediate family often holds the key to starting your family history research. Record the memories of your parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, siblings, and cousins as you start exploring your family tree online. Ask each relative about specific individuals and gather details surrounding their lives including nicknames, places they lived, vital information (including birth, marriage, and death dates), occupations, and other important clues.
Use who, what, where, when and why. Who was your grandfather? What did he do for a living? Where was he born? When did he marry your grandmother? Why did they move? Keep notes, you are the detective gathering the evidence. Search your home for scrapbooks. Family scrapbooks often yield important clues for family history research. Examine your home for vital records such as birth and marriage certificates, school records, family bibles, old photos, funeral notices, newspaper clippings and anything that tells about your family.
Start with the family history basics, write down what you know. Use your initial research for your first searches and then analyze your results to create a personal strategy of how you are going to compile your family’s history. The basic steps are
1. Start with what you know. Start your family tree using your parents, grandparents, and immediate family members.
2. Define your research goals: what do you want to know? Identify your objectives and make a research plan. A research plan identifies where you will search. A research log keeps us focused on what we are trying to discover and tracks the progress of our investigation. Don’t log into Ancestry.com with the goal of finding your family history, go with a specific goal of finding a grandma as a child on the 1880 census.
3. Search reliable sources. Online family trees would be considered in a court of law as hearsay, so find some real evidence. Conduct a reasonably exhaustive search in reliable sources for all information that is or may be pertinent to the identity, relationship, event or situation in question. Collect the evidence and decide if you want hard copies, handwritten, typed or digital images and how you are going to preserve them. Use online family trees as a cheat sheet and see if you can prove the information yourself.
4. Cite each source. This is a good thing to learn at the beginning so you won’t have to retrace your steps. Collect and include in your compilation a complete and accurate citation to the source or sources of each item of information you use. Citing sources will give credibility to your research, help you have confidence in the research of others, and aids during analysis. If you are working with an online family tree, add the sources to each person. Help others not have to duplicate the same research you have done.
The second part continues next week.
For more information, contact Shanna Jones (435) 628-4900 shannasjones@msn.com