Building a Family Tree
Trace Your Lineage Through An Efficient Use Of Time and Resources
Dec 3, 2008
Building a family tree sounds easy. Sure, maybe you’ve made a cute family tree in 2nd grade, complete with your wobbly-written grandparents’ names over a crayoned tree, but what about a family tree dating back to the pilgrims aboard the Mayflower? What do you do when you go farther than two generations, with 8, then 16, then more and more great-something-grandparents piling up faster than you can count?
The amount of ancestors to track, and the multitude of resources, records, and clues you find can be complex and exhausting. It is important to begin with a plan to ensure a successful exploration of your family history.
Generating a Plan: Focus Your Family Search
Before generating a plan, build the foundation of your family tree. Gather the resources available in your home such as photo albums and birth certificates, and interview easily accessible family members to collect basic information. Important things to find out are dates and locations of major life events such as birth, death, and marriage, as well as personal stories and “what life was like” for a person.
Once you have a basic sketch of your family tree, look for gaps in it that need to be filled. Are some relatives missing information? Is there a particular branch or group that seems especially intriguing, or that might be easy to search? To avoid being burned out by a haphazard search, narrow your focus to one surname/location or one family branch.
Once you’ve chosen a family group, create a to-do list for the information you’re missing, and what parts of their lives you still need to verify. Then write down resources and records you can use to find such information and voila! You now have a plan.
As you follow your plan, be sure to log the clues you found, the resources you used, and the summaries you collected to better see how you’re progressing.
Use Free and Subscription Public Record Services Wisely
Public records are a good place to start once you’ve exhausted your personal resources available at home. Public records include documents such as birth, marriage, and death certificates, and some of these are available online.
There are many free sites like Records Project that link you to public records databases online. Paid services, however, often make your search easier and more time-efficient, like Public Records Pro which allows you to search multiple databases for a certain name. It is up to you whether the hands-on detective work or a paid search service is preferable.
Organize Your Findings with Family Tree Building Tools
Once you begin your search, it is crucial to document your findings in an organized way. After all, you’re building a family tree, not a collage. There are many choices of how to organize the collected information, but the trouble is actually organizing it. There are various computer-based tools available to help you with this.
For example, you could use a timeline of major events to map out a context to their life; online timeline creators make this easy. You can also chart your family tree in many ways—beautiful, organized, even interactive. Browse the web for the software best suited to your interests, taking into account availability, pricing and platform. Some are simple, free programs or printable forms available online; others, such as RootsMagic, are more powerful software packages that must be purchased.
Armed with your plan and these resources, you are sure to create just the family tree you want—this time, more sophisticated than your crayon-drawn, wobbly family tree from 2nd grade.
