Mystery in History
My Top Ten Techniques for Family Tree Research
I’ve logged hundreds of hours building family trees for people
When I help people build their family trees online, the easiest way for me to do it is to just take over and do it for them. However, I can totally understand why someone would want to do their own tree. I personally get little dopamine hits from putting together a tree. So yeah, go ahead and make your own tree. I understand.
Here are some tips.
1. Start strong
Well begun is half done.
I get as much information from my client as possible before I start. This first set of information should be as precise as possible. If you are gathering information from your family, every little detail of family knowledge is worth its weight in gold. Gather all your paper sources to have on hand to compare to what the online documents say.
Once I have good information in hand, then I can start entering names and birth and death dates for direct ancestors until I can get back to people who were born before 1950. I use the website Ancestry.com, but there are other websites out there that also work.
