When you begin building a family tree, you can easily get overwhelmed with hundreds of online hints, copy-and-paste profiles, and family stories passed down through generations. The challenge isn’t how many names to include. The challenge is to figure out which names, dates, places, and connections have any merit. Most successful starting trees are more modest than they seem. They start with people you know for certain. They use original documents you can view. And they provide citations for all the information included.
Start with yourself, or another living family member, and work backward a generation at a time. Include the person’s full name, including maiden name, patronymic, nickname, or alternative spelling. Add birth, marriage, residence, and death information only if you know where it came from. Birth dates from a relative’s memory are helpful, but classify it as family information instead of a vital record. Doing so ensures you don’t lose sight of unconfirmed data by incorporating it into the tree.
Before you search a genealogy site, take stock of everything you already have. Certificates, passports, correspondence, obituaries, photo captions, address books, and notebooks are great sources of names and locations. Don’t just focus on one piece of information within a document. Look at the entire thing. A marriage record, for instance, can give you parents, witnesses, occupations, addresses, and a maiden name. Record the document title, date, names mentioned, and the physical or digital location of the document. The source citation helps you revisit and verify the record later.
Build a family group sheet for one couple and their children. It’s easier to track a small family unit than an expansive pedigree chart. Input the known information and identify any information that is likely, possible, or unresolved. If you find a photo captioned “Grandfather Ivan, 1948,” but your aunt tells you that Ivan moved to the village in 1950, don’t try to reconcile the two pieces of information. List them both, indicate the source of each, and turn the discrepancy into a question for further research.
Once you’ve built your family group sheet, write up a brief timeline for one person. List all known events in chronological order, using approximate dates and places as needed. The timeline may reveal conflicting information suggesting two different people, or an estimated date for a vital event. You might also gain ideas for future searches. A location mentioned in a child’s birth certificate could lead you to a census, parish register, military record, newspaper archive, or cemetery index.
Keep a research log from day one, even if your search doesn’t yield results. Note the collection, variant surname, date range, location, keywords, and findings. Negative results are still valuable because they keep you from repeating an unsuccessful search and may reveal an alternative surname index. You’ll also want to search the records of related people along with the direct ancestor. Siblings, witnesses, neighbors, or other cohabitants may help you determine which individual fits which vital record.
Look closely at several connections in your tree before you add another generation. For each parent-child or spousal connection, ask what record you found and whether another person with a similar name could fit the same details. Your early tree doesn’t have to look complete. It just has to show you what you know, what you don’t know, and what to look for next.