5 Steps to Become Your Family Historian and Genealogist

1. Beginning with you, Write your name, birthday, hometown, parents names, spouse if married, date of marriage, place where married, children names and their birthdays. The easiest way to do this is to create a spread sheet with using excel. After you do your own family, do your parents, grandparents and so on. (If you have been married more than once, you will do a sheet for each marriage. You will end up with quite a few sheets before you are done since EACH family group needs a sheet of its own.

Your mother and father's family group will have a sheet, your father's family group (your paternal grandparents) will have a sheet, you mother's family group (maternal grandparents) will have a sheet and on and on. It is probably a good idea to go ahead and fill in Pedigree Charts at the same time. As you are filling out these sheets, here are a few things to keep in mind that will be helpful: * Write the surname in all capital letters.

We will get into primary and secondary sources later.

2. After you glean as much info as you can from your living kin folk, bibles, military records, etc., you will definitely want to find out if others have already done research on your family tree. Check places like your families home church or place of worship, you might also want to join the Roots-L list, where you can ask general questions. Also make sure you run a search of the USGenWeb Archive Project records that we have online. You can reach the search engines at Search Files by State and National Search Engine.

3. Your next stop is probably going to be in the Census Records. There is a wealth of info to be gleaned from census records, particularly those from 1850 on. You can search these records in person at The National Archives in Washington, DC and in any of the subsidiaries of the Archives. Many local libraries have started great genealogical sections that include census records from many, many states. So, check your local library to see what they have. The Census Index is done in a format called Soundex, so you will need to convert the surname you are researching to Soundex code before using the index.

A good online Surname to Soundex Converter is available online. The places with Census Records will have printed Soundex converters that you can use. You will want to record your census data on a Census Worksheet and you can print worksheets from Family History SourceGuide A lot of Census Data is now online, thanks to many dedicated volunteers who have spent hours readying this info for the Web. The USGenWeb Project has it's own Census Projects that you should take a look at. The links are The USGW Census Project & The USGenWeb Archive Census Project.

4. It might also be helpful to post queries on the USGenWeb County page where your ancestor lived. Someone out there just might have the answer. Check out our Queries page to learn what they are and how to make them most effective.

5. If you are serious about this hobby and plan to continue as far as you can, you will probably want to invest in a computer program for genealogy. Computers can do the most wonderful things for the genealogist. They can keep track of ALL that paper, they can group families and print out the Family Group Sheets, you can do ancestral or descendant charts. You can cross reference, scan in photos and save those, and so much more.

For more information on go here!