|
I
Want To Do My Family Tree, Where Do I Start? My
Best Advice Is To Start With What You Already Know!
I'll briefly outline how I began my family tree, this may not be expert
advice, but since I started off by knowing almost nothing at all about my
family, I guess you could consider this lessons for the novice.
I knew my mother's surname, and my grandmother's married surname when I
began my research. My mother never really knew anyone outside of her immediate family,
and her father had passed away one month before she had been born.
Utilizing the knowledge my mother had from my grandmother and tales my
grandmother had relayed to me, I began my quest to create a family tree.
Each week I shall relay more information regarding my family tree and how I
took, my mother's surname and created a tree with information concerning more
than 1200 individuals, covering seven generations, one of which remained in
Germany.
Search Browseabit:
I
began by simply writing down everything I knew
about my mother's family. I started by purchasing
the program: Family
Tree Maker . I entered every piece of
information I knew concerning my family, including my
descendants. After inserting my information, I went to my
mother, questioning her on family information.
This is where things became tricky, for I now
was learning that persons I had grown-up referring to as Aunt
and Uncle, were not biologically related to me. Additionally, my
mother named aunts and uncles, but did not know for certain how
they fit in our family tree. Family Tree Maker offers an option
called: 'add unrelated individual.' This way I was able to
include persons that I thought were related, adding notes as to
my discoveries, as well as being able to add persons that were
truly biologically related, but not knowing where they fit into
my family tree.
My list was growing fast, within a week I had
nearly 100 persons on my family tree. The BIG question was:
Where Did I Go From Here?
Bookmark this page so that you can check in on
4/22/2002 to learn the next step.
|
