Whoooo are you? Who who who who

Now that I've got you all singing that darn song and thinking of Gill Grissom........

As some of you know, I have been researching my family tree for a few years now. Some people I know have expressed an interest in researching their own, but like me when I started, had absolutely NO CLUE how to begin, so instead of sounding like a broken record (in my own head) and repeating this to multiple people I'll tackle it here.

Start with what you know!!!

For me, that was a death notice for my great-grandmother that my beloved Grampy had kept for his mom that I now had possession of about five years ago. She came from a fairly large family (the second of seven) and thankfully her obit listed all her siblings and her parents, so that part was easy, but what then? Well, I had absolutely no clue where to go AFTER that. I was like Hansel and Gretel, wandering around lost in the woods, with no trail of bread crumbs to lead me where I needed to be, so I put it all to the side and forgot about it. A year or so later I met someone who did Genealogy as a job who threw me a trail of breadcrumbs to lead me down the right path. Now that I think about it though, since the family tree addiction has taken its hold, I think I am more lost in those darn woods then ever!

Talk to people

Go to your grandparents! Once you get past the smell of Chanel #5 and Bengay and talks about their bunions and dentures, the stories you may get are a researcher's dream!! So much of who we are and where we come from is lost cause we don't take the time to get to know those who have come and gone before us. Do be cautious though about assuming what you hear is the God's honest truth. It's not that they try to deliberately mislead you, but alot of times they retell stories that they heard from their parents, who heard it from their parents, who heard it from their parents, etc. It's like a hugh child's game of Telephone or telegram, I think we used to call it, where you get a bunch of kids sitting on the ground in a circle and you whisper something in the ear of the kid to the right of you and by the time it makes it back to you it has a couple words that you said, but it now contains more fiction that fact. (Of course, sometimes they do mislead you on purpose if it means revealing family skeletons hehe)

Sources

For the love of Pete, make note of them! Every single solitary little tidbit of information you get, keep track of WHERE you got it. This is the one thing the majority of new researchers DON'T do and wish someone hadda told them TO DO! As you research, it isn't a question of "if" you encounter conflicting information, it's a question of WHEN you encounter it. You do not want to be part of the probably 99.9% of researchers pounding your head against the desk yelling where the hell did I get THAT? Especially not if you are at the library. They tend to frown on that.

Do the work

Don't just go to ancestry, rootsweb, tribalpages or any of the other billions of family tree websites and punch in an ancestors name, come up with a tree (or twenty) that contains the name of the person you are looking for and assume, since John Doe has em listed, that what they have is fact. While a great starting point to point you where to go next, do your OWN work. Look at the information they show then go looking for where it came from. Majority of time these trees are NOT sourced and when you try contacting them, IF you are lucky to find someone with a still current email, chances are they have no idea where the hell the information came from cause they got it from someone else's tree on some site who got it from someone else and on and on. See Telephone game thingy above! Nowadays, there is really no excuse NOT to be able to do the work on your own since there are so many records available on the internet (that's another blog all in itself). Check the web for a state/province archives, or type in your search bar (insert states here) marriage/death/ or birth index.

Family Tree Software

If the bug bites ya, get yourself some type of Family Tree Software to keep your information in. You don't want a bunch of scraps of paper here and there that you KNOW are gonna get lost. Some can be expensive and other can be cheap (I got mine for ten bucks at Radioshack), others can even be FREE! Google is a wonderful thing, try using it to locate free ones. A word of advice with these though, create your gedcoms (a family tree file) and email it to yourself at your yahoo/hotmail/whatever account. Last thing you want to do is lose years worth of work if something happens to your computer. Backing it up alone ain't gonna do diddly squat if someone steals your computer or your house catches on fire.

I'm sure there is more I missed but that's all I can think of. If you made it through the whole thing, you are obviously interested in genealogy and just really damn bored, either way thanks for dropping by!