Genealogy - The Art and Science of Family Tree Making

Genealogy is the study of your family and their roots. For some people it is not enough to know about themselves and their immediate family. For them the chance that their genealogy traces back to a knight or noble of the Middle Ages is irresistible. Perhaps you feel the same way.

The off chance that you have an ancestor that was a hero of the Revolutionary War is a tug that will lead you on an adventure, but where do you start?

Start at home. Write down what you know for sure then talk to your relatives. Once you have talked to all of your older relatives and have rummaged through every photo album you can find, what do you do?

One other place to look is the internet. There is a large buffet of information on the web, but not all of it is useful. Finding the right information is the hard part. The most obvious sources on the web are genealogy websites. These genealogy websites are set up to handle the inquiries that you will be making. Some of these sites are ancestory.com, rootsweb.com, and myheritage.com. All of these websites offer many different resources for a genealogical search. While you are on these sites you can search for marriage licenses, birth and death certificates, census records, tax information, wills, military records, and criminal history(if available). The trickiest part is figuring out which of the results is actually one of your relatives. If you know other bits and pieces of information you can filter out the false results and fill in some missing links. The more information you have the easier it is to find relatives.

Your local courthouse can also be a sources of good information for genealogy purposes. Just like the genealogy websites you will be able to find marriage, birth, and death records. Divorce records are another source of information. On less obvious place to search are the funeral homes and cemeteries in the towns that your ancestors lived in. They sometimes have clues to spouses and children. These may be the clues you need to do a more thorough search online. Every gap filled is another limb on your family tree.

Genealogy, unlike other hobbies, is rewarding not only for the person doing the research, but for the rest of their family and members to come. Having all the information possible makes it easier for someone to take over for you when you get older. Keeping track of your families genealogy has to be a labor of love because of all of the time that it consumes, but the rewards are worth the effort.

You can be your greatest resource for finding out where you can from, who all of your ancestors were and what they did for a living or if there were any great accomplishments in their lives. Researching genealogy and family trees are not difficult things. You just have to commit time and energy. The whole process starts with you finding out a little bit about your family and maybe a little about yourself along the way. Collecting oral genealogy is a great start.

This is the easy part. Talk to as many of your older relatives as possible. Get the full names of your grandparents as far back as possible. Eventually you will come to a point when someone doesn't remember the names of their grandparents. You will want to get maiden names and the names of all of their children. Get every detail of your genealogy as far back as you can. Children's names are important since you may need to verify you are looking up the right person and having all of the children's names will help you do that. Try to get dates and places for births, marriages, deaths, and anywhere they may have lived. Look for written documents and old pictures to help fill in gaps in your genealogy. Pictures are helpful because they occasionally have dates, names, and places on the back. If a picture shows a relative in 1912 by the Statue of Liberty, that gives a place to start looking for them in this country. Sometimes there are little notes on the back, too. Something like "John's first trip to Brooklyn" can give you a sense of personal involvement with your ancestors.

Once you have gone back as far as your word of mouth research can take you, then it is time to move to other methods like the internet. The internet has open a world of wonders for people who are researching genealogy. Genealogy websites offer birth and death certificates, marriage records, and old census information. Military and, sometimes, criminal records can be found online. Some of these sites are free, but seem difficult to use. For a small fee other sites give you easy use and access to the information that you need. Although some of this information is free, the site are not always the best to use. The interface is difficult or information is oddly categorized. It is probably best to pay a small fee to get accurate information to build an extensive family tree. The results will cost a little now, but they will offer your family a lifetime of memories for your great-great-great grandchildren and beyond. They will also give you a sense of fulfillment because you created this accurate genealogy.

Compiling all of the genealogy records that you need can be exhausting. There will be dead ends, but you will get to know who your ancestors were and who you are by pushing as far back as possible. One of the biggest thrills of researching family trees is the thrill of solving what you thought was a dead end.

Genealogy supplies are very different from the supplies that you would need for any other hobby. You only need one major tool...your brain. The resources you need are information. With genealogy you are more of a detective than anything else.

Genealogy starts with words. The words from talking to your relatives. By talking to your relatives, you will be able to gather a lot of information. Especially from you oldest relatives. There are certain things that you will want to have on you when you talk to these relatives...pencil and paper and an expandable folder. A good notebook will go father in genealogy than any other tool you could use. A tape recorder will help sometimes, but there are things you can only write down. You will also want to collect any old pictures and documents that you can.

That is where the expandable folder comes in handy to keep all of the documents you collect organized. Remember to write names, dates, and locations on the back of every photo that you can. Maybe even keep track of who gave you the photo. You might need to make copies of the documents that you collect.

A good scanner is another valuable resource for just that purpose. A scanner allows you to keep the document permanently and print it when you need to. A printed genealogy document is a good way to preserve the original, but still have a copy in your family tree scrapbook.

The genealogy supplies that you need for the first part of your search are easy to gather. Once you have talked to all of your relatives, you will need to follow through on other sources of information.

The best place to turn is the internet. A lot of people have a hard time thinking of the internet as a supply, but it is for genealogy. You will have to pay a small fee to use the best sites, but the treasure trove of information that you find is well worth the small amount of cash it costs you.

You should also look into investing in genealogy software to help you keep you work organized. Both of these resources offer you the convenience of working from your own home.

Family tree templates can be a very helpful genealogy supply. Sometimes creating a family tree can be a little tricky. You might want to hand out these templates to family so that they can fill in a little of the information that they know.

Occasionally, you will run into the question of whether or not to include an entire family. Your great grandfather had 12 brothers and sisters, should you include them all or just him? Templates, charts, and other genealogy forms that you can download from the web can help you to solve this type of problem.

Although genealogy supplies are few in number, they are as every bit as important as a wood workers awl or chisel. You have to people to think creatively to find some of the records that you will need to fill in an accurate genealogy for your family tree.

Does the work involved with a genealogy project seem overwhelming to you? The task seems daunting, but you have your hear set on completing a family tree. The problem could be that every family tree that you have ever seen is very complicated. They look too complicated to understand let alone create. Building a family tree can be easy if you have a format to follow.

After collecting all of the records and other data about your genealogy, you may have problems figuring out how to neatly arrange them into a family tree that is organized and easy to read.

The best thing to do is to follow a set format and look at an example family tree for fresh ideas. There are internet companies that will let print sample family trees. That will make it easier to know where to plug your information in. This will give you an idea of where each persons name goes and in what order to place them. You also can pay for a personal family tree to be done.

There are several sites where you can submit you photos and or names of the people you want on your family tree and they will generate your personal family tree...for a fee. This is a great way to have a professional display for your home, but you will still want to put all of the information together for your family as a keepsake.

Having someone else create your family tree will take some of the fun out of tracing your genealogy.

Once you have put all of the time into researching your genealogy and putting all of those documents together, you will want to be able to show off the results. Some people think of making a scrapbook. If you put these pieces of your family history in a scrapbook, you are giving any one who is interested the opportunity to look over your genealogy quickly and easily. It will also keep all of your work protected and safe.

Starting a family tree scrapbook is just like starting any other scrapbooking project. First, pick a book that is going to be large and sturdy enough to hold all of the information that you want to put into it. Preferably, you should buy one that you can add pages to. This will allow future generations to add to your genealogy scrapbook or it will let you add to the book if you find any new information. It makes the most sense to start with the oldest information and work your way towards your own generation and that of your children.

After you have bought the genealogy scrapbook that you want, the next step is to figure out your page layout. Organize your documents, pictures, mementos, and anything else you intend to put in the scrapbook for the next step. The first page should be the oldest documents that you have and be about the oldest generation that you can find. Some people like to go in reverse order, but that doesn't make as much sense. If you start with you great grandparents, make a layout that has all of pictures and any records you may have about them. Make sure to label each and every piece. Be sure to include full names, dates, and places that they may have lived.

An added bonus of tracing your genealogy is that you get to talk to a lot of your relatives to find out interesting facts. With word of mouth you won't have documents as evidence, but that doesn't mean that you can't include the information in your scrapbook. Since print is easier to read, you should print out the story and who told it.

The order of the pages sort of take on a life of their own after that. If you start with the grandparents on your mothers side then you should continue with that part of the family down to your mother, and you, before you move on to your fathers grandparents. Another way to go about it is to include the information in chronological order and include both sides of the family at once.

There are a few tips to follow when you are creating a family tree scrapbook: be sure that you only have one couple or a person per page, make sure that the names and dates a clearly printed and visible, and, above all else, take the time and patience to complete this important project. The genealogy in this scrapbook could be lost in the future generations if you do not take the time to put it all together.

It can be difficult to keep all of the records and information organized when you are making a family tree. At times you may feel overwhelmed with information from different sources. After all of the work that you have put into this genealogy project, you want everything to stay together and be accurate. A large number of people turn to software programs that they can download that will help them with staying organized.

As with any other purchase, you will want to buy the software that offers you the most for your money.

Family Tree Maker

The most popular program out there today is the Family Tree Maker from Ancestry.com.
This piece of genealogy software has many great features. It allows you to upload videos, audio, and pictures. You can create a time line, reports, charts, and family trees. All of these features help you to stay organized. This program can also take information from other sites, like www.rootsweb.com, and store it for you, but it works best with Ancestry.com. It also allows you to print out keepsakes for your scrapbooking project. A few other features are that you can add specific information about one person at a time.That lets you build on that persons history by adding a spouse and children or important dates like birth's or death's, or where they lived. If you enter data about where someone lived, Family Tree Maker will show you a map of where that location is. You can also publish your family tree online for other members of your family to view. Sharing the genealogy information that you have gathered is one of the most rewarding aspects of one of these projects. All of these features come at a very low price, $29.95 plus tax and shipping.

Family Tree Builder

MyHeritage.com is a site that offers a program for free called Family Tree Builder. You won't have all of the extensive options that you have with Family Tree Maker, but a free genealogy software program could be worth skipping a few options. Family Tree Builder allows for the uploading of pictures and documents. You can also publish your family tree to the web for your family members to see. One unique feature allows you to tag people that you are able to recognize in a photo. That information is then readily available.

When putting all of the information together from the research that you did on your genealogy project, it sometimes helps to use a software program. Family Tree Maker software is the most popular paid program available and it has many neat options. Family Tree Builder has fewer option, but it is free. $29.95 versus free. It all comes down to what options you feel that you really need. It's like a Cadillac against a Chevette. Whichever way you go, your genealogy project will be kept a lot neater and more organized than it would be without a program to help.