Posts tagged "researching family history"

Planning your family research

Suppose you are interested in finding information about your great-grandmother. Here are a few tips that will help you create a solid research plan:

1.  Write down as much as you know about the person or persons you want to learn more about. Write down all the details you think might help you distinguish your ancestor from someone else’s like approximate date of birth and birth place, date of marriage and spouse’s name, names of any children, and the approximate date of death.

2. Write down exactly what you hope to learn about the person you’re tracking. Getting sidetracked when researching family history is easy. It can be very exciting to uncover facts you never new about your family and this can cause you to lose sight of your initial goals in tracing your family tree. This is why it’s important to write down your goals in your basic research plan. For example, your goal might be to learn as much as you can about one side of your family or learn more about an old story you’ve heard about your ancestors.

3. Use a genealogical search engine to get a general idea of what’s available. Using a site like Ancestry.com can help you find information about your ancestors. To start, just enter the name where the person you are searching lived to narrow the results. The data that you obtain will give you an indication of the range of resources available.

4. Prioritize the resources you can use. The results that are delivered on these genealogical search engines could turn up different resources like mailing lists, newsgroups, and one-name study sites. It’s best to prioritize the resources you are going to use. An excellent starting point would be to visit a site like Ancestry.com that give you access to civil registration documents that will allow you to verify important dates and events.

5. Once you’ve identified the resources you want to use, schedule time to use them. Tracing your family history is actually a lifelong pursuit. You can’t download every bit of information and documentation that you need all at once. Because researching your family history requires time and effort on your part, I recommend that you schedule time to work on specific parts of your research. Believe it or not, genealogy can be addictive so breaking it down into small tasks allows you to get the most from your research efforts without getting yourself bogged down by information.

There are a wide variety of websites online that make it possible to build your family tree at no cost. Mundia.com is the one I recommend. As you make progress with your research, be sure to keep good notes and share information with your relatives.

Family history research tips

Planning ahead is crucial to the success of any project, and a family history research project is no exception. Many people feel that planning is the least enjoyable part of researching their family tree. It’s true, finding your long lost ancestors and learning more about your family is the fun part of researching your roots. However, one of the most important parts of a research project like this is proper planning. Every family history research plan should define who and what you’re looking for and each task should be prioritized. Having a family history research plan can save you hours of work and keep you focused on your family research goals, be it finding an ancestor or looking for clues about when, where and how they lived.

Undoubtedly you know that information from around the world is available on the Internet. This is absolutely true, you can find millions of names on the thousands of family history websites you will find online. However, due to the vast number of sites to search through, you might find yourself overwhelmed after visiting one site after another. Additionally, you will probably be very tempted to keep a record of anything that may be relevant to your family history, no matter how remote the possibility.

Because there is so much information available on the Internet, it’s critical to create a family history research plan. This can save you plenty of frustration and hours of your time by keeping you focused. Tens of thousands of genealogical sites are available on the Internet. Without a good plan you can get lost in no time at all when researching online. You might be surprised at how easy it is to get lost on the Internet, especially when you start tracking a person just to find out hours later the person wasn’t even part of your family.

To keep this from happening to you, be sure you take the same approach with online research as you would if you were using an archive.  When you have a research plan and keep detailed notes of websites you’ve visited you will be sure you don’t do the same research more than once. Some websites periodically change their appearance so you might not realize you’ve already visited the site if you don’t keep good notes.

If you have a tendancy toward organization, you can keep your detailed notes either in a notebook or on your computer. If you’re the kind of person who knows exactly what you want and need at all times, and you have an excellent memory of where you pause during the course of your projects, your research plan can exist solely in your mind. In other words your research plan can be as formal or informal as you like as long as it helps you to plot what you’re looking for.

If you’re searching for an excellent resource for researching your family tree, Mundia.com is highly recommended. In addition to having all the tools you need to build your family tree, this site makes it easy for other family members to upload documents and photos and share interesting stories related to your ancestors. Creating your family tree is easy with the help of Mundia and registration is absolutely free. The site allows users to search other family trees in their database to look for similarities that will help you quickly grow your tree. If you really want to learn more about your family history, this is the place to start.