Creating your Family Tree
Creating your Family Tree
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So you have decided to create your family tree. Where do you start?? The best place to start is with what you know. You know yourself and your immediate family. Gather up all of the names, dates and locations for births, marriages, and deaths. This is the beginning of your family tree. Then you can expand to your siblings and your parents and grandparents and your aunts and uncles and all of the people in their families.
By now you should have quite a few names, dates and
locations. What should you do with them? How do you create a family tree? I had wanted to create a family tree for a
long time, but I didn't know how to document the information. Then I saw
Family Tree Maker software in a store and I decided to try it. Well, I liked it.
A family tree software is very helpful for collecting and organizing your family
tree information. You can still use paper for an
Ancestral Chart or a
Family Group Sheet and collect the
pages in a binder, but to me that is a lot of extra work, especially in this
computer age.
As a side note, since I wrote the above, maintaining your family tree database in the computer is essential. But sometimes it is nice to flip thru pages of the information, you get a different feel for your tree. Maintaining a binder for your tree is also useful for keeping the paper records and pictures close to the tree.
Now you have begun, what's next in creating your family tree???
Other useful information:
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Very Important!! Keep track of the sources of all of your
family tree information. Some times you will have multiple sources, write them all down and/or record them in your family tree software program. Family tree software let's you do this, either in a source information location or just in the notes section for a person. It is very necessary to do this; especially as your family tree grows, you will have more and more people in your family tree that you don't know. How is it that you found out about a person in the
first place? Was it from an obituary, from somebody else's family tree on-line, from a conversation with another family member (
Correspondence Record)?? (Some info for
Writing to Your Relatives) You
won't remember unless you write it down, document it some how. It takes a little extra time to do this but it will be worth it in the end. I, personally, have a lot of undocumented information and I don't know how some of the people got into my family tree! So from my family tree mistakes, hopefully you can gain some understanding in the importance of this step.
As you get found on the internet, or find others, you will be generating a lot of e-mail correspondence. This correspondence is worth copying into your family tree. Save both your side of the conversation and your new relative's side of the conversation. Not only are you saving your source information for whatever tidbits might have been exchanged, but you are adding life to your tree by incorporating the entire conversation. Store the e-mails on the other person's family page within your program to keep them close to the source.
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Family tree data can come from a lot of different places; vital records and
other official sources; correspondence with family members, either e-mail or
traditional; church records; census data
View Original Census Records at Ancestry.com; naturalization papers; immigration
manifests; family discussions; and on and on. If you are new to family tree
research, start your organization immediately, otherwise, you may never catch
up, and then you will have boxes of unsorted information (sounds like somebody I
know...)
You can organize a couple different ways, either by type of data, listed
above, or by person. It's really a personal choice which way you organize, but
start early and organize often. Some of your organization can be on your
computer too. For example, I organize census data in a spread sheet. I have
looked at the same census images so many times, over and over again, it felt
like I was spinning my wheels. I have a spread sheet for each census,
1930, 1920, etc. In addition to the information that is collected on the census
for each individual, I identify the header information in the spread sheet as
well, the state, county, township/city, enumeration district number and the
image/page number. For a paper version you can use
Census Extraction Forms. Other useful tools could be a
Research Calendar or a
Research Extract for documents that you can't copy. Don't forget to back up your computer data on a disk for safe
keeping.
You will probably also acquire photographs and memorabilia for family members. These will need to be organized as well. Keep the original in a safe place and scan the images if you can, especially the photographs, because they can fade with time.
And so this brings me back to the binder comment I made above. I have finally started the sorting of all my boxes of family tree info. I got four or five 3-ring binders and have started to create my family tree books. I started with the family group sheets, printed out from the database, and separated the main family groups with tabbed dividers. Next, I inserted copies of the censuses that I also printed out (I highlighted the family in yellow just to make them easier to find.) Then for the fragile or one-of-a-kind items, I got page protectors. Some of the fragile items I laminated just to keep them from falling apart any more. I also printed out some internet maps of the locations that the family lived and put them in the binder. Basically, whatever information you have can be organized into your binders. Don't forget the pictures!
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Trace back one generation at a time
Resist the temptation to jump back 3 or 4 generations without an official family connection, just because you heard a family story that says you are related to royalty or a train robber. Take it one generation at a time. That's not to say you can't document these people and their family legends in your database, just don't connect them to your family with an Unknown descendant of Jesse James or whoever. I've seen family trees that go all the way back to Abraham, in the Bible, and to the Egyptian Pharaohs, with majors assumptions, a.k.a. holes. Not very good genealogy if you ask me.
In my Muszyna, Poland, family tree, I knew the four family names from my grandfather's birth certificate. And then I got the Muszyna church records that the Mormon church had collected. I went thru the church records in chronological order, copying each birth record that had one of my family names in it. I entered all of these birth records into my database as unrelated individuals, and then I connected them as I found other birth records that confirmed a family relationship. It takes a long time (I'm still not done!), but hopefully your family tree will have correct family relationships, instead of undoing a lot of mistakes later on.
And even with tracing back one generation at a time, it's still not always fool-proof, especially if there are errors in the original documents. Sometimes in the old handwritten records, names get crossed. The recorder of the entry writes the mother down as the grandmother and the grandmother as the mother in a baptismal record. You start to think you are going crazy because the last time you found an entry similar to this family you found the women listed in the opposite positions. Well, make a note and go back in time a little more to see if you can find another birth entry for this family, or check the marriage records to see who is actually married to whom.
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I've already mentioned a number of sources that could be available to you above. A source is anything that you can get family information from. Vital records, birth, marriage and death certificates, are the official sources, the undisputable facts. (Hopefully they are 100% correct) Other sources can lead you to the locations to find the vital records. Census data, naturalization papers, obituaries, immigration information, military records, newspaper articles, and on and on. You might also find a book of your family's genealogy compiled by some other family member. Most likely they did a good job, but it is not always perfect. Basically, keep looking, one source can lead to another source.
Networking. Sources can also be other family members, both known and newly found, internet cousins. Document that such-in-such information came from Aunt Dorothy or Cousin Fred, and when you received their information.
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Oral family histories are wonderful. They bring life to the names, dates and locations. Especially talk to older family members, and the sooner the better, but talk to everybody that you can, or are interested in talking to. Everybody has their story to tell you. Write it all down, or better yet, ask if you can tape record your history conversations.
Once you get into the grove of your family history addiction, you'll start to hear family stories all the time, you just have to be ready to write them down. So keep some note cards in your purse or pocket to jot down reminders of the key points so you can recreate the stories once you get back to your computer. Make sure you document who told you the story, the date you first heard it, and the approximate date that the event occurred.
And enjoy, enjoy, enjoy. The family tree hobby is great!!
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