The Art of Family Tree Research

Researching your family tree to find out where you came from, who were your ancestors or what they did begins from a very familiar place; yourself. Exploring your family tree is not as hard as you think. It just takes some time and energy. To gain the correct history for your family tree, you will need to learn a bit about your family.

Researching the past about your family on this level is very easy. You will want to speak to as many of your elder relatives that you can. Get the full names of your grandparents, your great grandparents, your great, great grandparents and so on. You will come to a point that a person will not remember the details about their grandparents. Also important with this data is maiden names and the names of their children. You will want to construct your family tree from as far back as you can. Names of their kids will become important because you may at times find documents from some place like the census that can include the names of any kids living within their homes.

By checking out the names of your ancestor?s siblings, you are able to check if the people you are looking up is the correct person within your family. Try to also collect as many dates or places where they may have lived as you can. Also information that is spread by people talking, look for written notes or old photos.

Documents like birth or death certifications can be much help in researching your family history. Pictures are helpful in a little less obvious way. Many times pictures will have a date on the backside of them maybe even a city or place. There may also be clues in the photos themselves. If you come across a old photo of your ancestor?s on a trip to see the Statue of Liberty with the date on the it that says 1935, you then have a point in time to go back to when wanting to figure out the year they entered the United States.

Once you have done the best you can at researching your family history through word of mouth, it is time to move on to other sources of information.

Thanks to the internet there are a lot of different ways to search your family history. Some people sign up for websites, Some are free with, the easier ones to use will cost a small fee. With sites like these you gain access to a lot of other important data that are very hard to get otherwise. Genealogy sites offer censuses from the past, death, birth and marriage certificates, plus other public records like military records and criminal records. Also you will find several free sites you will be able to use to find your family history. Because they are free, these sites can get kind of tricky. If you really want to get correct info and build your extensive family tree, it?s better to go with a site that will cost a small amount now but, the results you receive will be around through the lifetimes of your children?s children.

Source: http://www.1directory.net/arts-and-entertainment/the-art-of-family-tree-research-18434.html

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