How do you create a family tree ? where do you begin?

Answer 1

The best place to begin researching your family tree is with your very own family. Get a note book and write down everything that you know about yourself and your siblings. Include dates and places of birth, marriage and if applicable death dates and places of interment. As soon as you have all that, move back a generation to your parents. Once you have all of that, move back to your grandparents and keep going until you run stuck. Once you have written down everything you know, talk to your family members. Sometimes even your siblings know more than you do, but usually if you talk to your parents or grandparents they can go a generation or two further than you can simply because they are a generation or two older than you.

One thing I should mention to you since you are a new genealogist is to document EVERYTHING! This will save you so much work later. If you get a date from Grandma's bible, simply document that information. If you can get in the practice of doing this from the beginning, you will avoid making the big mistake that most of us genealogists made while we were starting out. Think about it... if you have 50 people in your family tree, you might be able to keep this information "in your head", but what happens when this number rises to 500 or 50,000? After a while genealogy gets in your blood and 50,000 people is not and unfeasible number.

What happens next is up to you. What are you interested in? Would you like to know who all of your great great grandparents are? Are you interested in a particular surname? Are you trying to prove that you are related to someone famous? Only you know the answer to these questions? Once you've decided which avenue you want to explore you can continue. There are many records out there that genealogists use. Many of them are free, but there are others that are by subscription.

One thing I need to mention is that to trace your genealogy right, it is going to cost you, whether it be for a subscription to a genealogy site, paying for vital records, making copies of documentation, buying gas to visit libraries or cemeteries, but these are such worthwhile expenditures. The nice thing is that it is not money you spend all at one time. Many of my roots came from Michigan so everytime I go up there for a visit, I carve out time to got to the library or to the cemetery etc.

There are many people on this forum who are avid genealogists who have never paid for a membership to ancestry; however, I have found it invaluable. I live next to a branch of the National Archives and they have every census record in existence. If you start out looking up people in the census using the microfilms, there is a process you must follow that requires you to look at two microfilms before you find the census page of the family that you need. This is very time consuming and if you are looking up a family member with a name that is usually spelled wrong, there is no guarantee that you will find it. The beauty of having a membership to ancestry is that they have the censuses fully indexed meaning you can type in a name and pull it right up without looking on two microfilm rolls. Further, you can manipulate spellings of the name and the places you are searching in a single search. This alone has made Ancestry worth the money I have spent for a subscription. Many times Ancestry runs specials and I pay under $100.00 per year so if you divide that by 12, the expense is less than a subscription to Netflix or just about anything else. Ancestry also offers Military records, obituaries, marriage records, birth and death indexes and much much more.

With that said, there are also a lot of free resources. I have over 500 links to free genealogy records that I myself have found online. Here are some that can help just about everyone.

http://www.familysearch.org/Eng/Search/frameset_search.asp This is the webpage to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

http://searches.rootsweb.com/
This is a list of popular searchable databases on Rootsweb. There is a link to the Social Security Death index, as well as death records for California, Kentucky, Maine, and Texas. There are some international databases included too.

http://www.ellisisland.org/
If you are from the United States and know that you have ancestors that immigrated from other countries, there is a chance that Ellis Islands website could help you. You can actually look at the ships manifests on this site. It is so cool! You could even get information like how much money was in your great grandfathers pocket when he came over.

Then there are the message boards at both Ancestry and Rootsweb. They have boards for surnames, counties, States, and countries. This would be a great place to post information you already know about family members and attempt to build on it. It is always wise not to post information on living family members.

http://boards.ancestry.com/Default.aspx
http://genforum.genealogy.com/

You can also look at many of the existing trees out there to see if anybody has created one including members or your families. Sometimes you get lucky, but if you find one out there, I would recommend researching the information yourself before including it in your tree.

http://worldconnect.rootsweb.com/
http://www.gencircles.com/

After you get so far, you may want to try to input your information into a family tree program. There are several commercially available; however, there are a few that you can download for free off of the internet. PAF (Personal Ancestry File) is a very respectable program that you can download at

http://www.ldscatalog.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/CategoryDisplay?catalogId=10151&storeId=10151&categoryId=14000&langId=-1&cg1=&cg2=&cg3=&cg4=&cg5=

There are several different language versions available. Most programs have places for you to document your sources and have a file format called GEDCOM making it easy to share your tree with people using a different genealogy program or easy for you to change programs without reentering all of your information.

So, as you can see from my answer... there is a whole lot to learn about genealogy and finding resources. I learned just by jumping in and doing it. Once you get out in the genealogy community you will see that there are a lot of people eager to help you in any way they can. Have I made mistakes along the way? You bet... who hasn't? You will find though that the rewards are numerous and that it can get quite addicting.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me through my profile. Good luck!

Answer 2

pick a person any person.

no really - start with anyone, you will do. list your parents going up a line. list you brothers and sisters on the same line.

this is called an ancestor tree going back in time.

Or else list the oldest person you have data on and list under that person all the people related. This is a decendant tree.

Family Tree maker is a easy software program that allows you to list and print out from almost any point in the tree, back or forward. Others make some very good software also.

I have also seem hand drawn circle family trees that are very creative. Programs have the advange of easy editing for new data whereas written records get messy with additions.
Have fun.

Answer 3

The best place to start is with a book called "Unpuzzling your past". This book will take you step by step and is a great book. Then you need to decide, do you want to just do it on paper or do you want to keep it on your computer. If you want it on your computer then you need to decide what program you want to use. There a lot of them My favorite is Family Tree Maker because it's simple to use. Then just follow your roots. Be very careful about what you use from the internet. Research online is only as good as the researcher. Document (birth, death, marriage certificates). This can be a very costly hobby but very rewarding.
Happy hunting

Answer 4

Look on your birth certificate for the names of your parents and where they were born. Begin interviewing living relatives for their data, if these people are available to you. For each of your ancestors (perhaps beginning with parents listed on your birth record), find the county for the place of birth. Type the county name into a search engine, such as google (oops I mean Yahoo). Look for "where to write for vital records: Birth, marriage, death." If there is a form, download it and fill in Genealogy--(your relationship) for reason. If you have some records already, good, most people just have to grin and bear that awful wait for each record going backwards in ancestors, until the 1930 census can help out. Meanwhile, you may call a county and ask for a list of genealogy resources specific to that county. Prepare yourself for something called, "The serendipity of genealogy." (author unknown.) This is where data just simply unfolds in a most surprising way, leading you on a journey filled with exact matches. That is my wish for you. And, have fun in your discoveries!

Answer 5

If you are married you start with you and your wife's families your family is a branch in the tree and her family is another Then your children come off of the one branch that is you and your wife and when they grow up and have families it branches out from them so forth and so on. If you just want to start the tree from you and your wife you and your wife would be the trunk. Then each one of your children will branch off from the trunk. Then their families will branch off from each of them.

Answer 6

Start with your immediate family, then move backwards to your grandparents, their immediate family members, then to great grandparents, their immediate family members and continue on.

Answer 7

just begin with you
your name then your parents name (if you have siblngs just add them) then your grandparents to your mother side and father side. you can add too your parents siblings together with their son and daughter! both father side and mother side!
that's how i create a family tree