Resources

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So You Want To Know Your Family History

If you want to know, what a genealogy is and what it looks like consider a jigsaw puzzle. 

Unless all the pieces are put together, the full picture is never visible. 

The most common question asked by people taking to study their genealogy as first timers is this: ‘where do I start from?”

Start From Yourself

The answer is equally simple – start from yourself. 

You are the best person to start from and then proceed by working backwards. 

It will be dangerous for the researcher to jump a few generations and then work on the wrong line. 

A good approach is to go step by step and be methodical in your research. 

By doing this you will save yourself unnecessary trouble and not waste energy.

One effective way is to make a chart of one’s family, and the immediate generation and then work backwards. 

Once you have got your family chart ready, you should then interview your relatives. 

By interviewing your surviving grandparents, your parents, aunts, uncles etc. you will be able to fill gaps in the information you have collected and also add additional information. 

That way it is very easy to get your family history for about 100 years. 

Important Information 

When making family chart, ensure that each person’s information is elaborate. 

You should record the full name of a person including the middle name. 

Then important events in that person’s life should be noted down especially the date of birth, the year and day of marriage, when the person died etc. 

Other details like what their relationship was to family members of the genealogy tree will be helpful. 

Important places such as address where they were born, city where they migrated to etc is information crucial to creating one’s genealogy.

Some Good Resources

There are various resources available to a person to refer to while creating his or her genealogy. 

Municipal records like birth, marriage and death certificates are not the only places where one can go to for genealogy research. 

Other places where important information can be obtained are family Bibles, school records where the person studied, photographs, scrapbooks etc. 

Conclusion

Patience is a virtue when one goes about making his or her own genealogy. 

Many a time, information is not readily available, but you should never loose heart. 

You may also get stuck at a place, but more often than not, it will not be the dead end. 

Going step by step will take to the completion of a grand exercise of researching and recording your genealogy. 

So here are the last words as advice – Be patient and continue ahead.