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Portrait from Jason's family.

How to Get Started

A lot of people are interested in genealogy but do not know how to trace their family tree.  I have developed a simple method that anyone with a computer and internet access can use in order to put the pieces together.

Basic Steps

  1. Create a pedigree chart for yourself based upon what you remember about your family
  2. Talk to family members and relatives to see what they know
  3. Go on www.ancestry.com and see how many ancestors you can find
    • Census Records
    • Vital Records
    •  Military Records
  4. Go on www.familysearch.org to fill in the blanks still in place from Ancestry
  5. Locate your immigrant ancestor if possible and find the village or place of origin
  6. Go back to www.familysearch.org, type the name of that location into the “Placename” or “Keyword” section of the find a film search tool on the homepage in order to see what records have been microfilmed for that location.
  7. See what records have been digitized.  If you can’t view them at home, then view them at your local LDS Family History Library or LDS Affiliate Library (most likely a local public library).  Use those records, most likely church records, to recreate your family tree going from baptism record to marriage of parents to baptism of parents to marriage of grandparents and so on back in time.
  8. Learn as much as you can about that location.  Index the records if you have the time to.  Find out as much as you can about what still exists.
  9. Travel to that country or hire a local in that country to go to the archives and find records such as land and property records that may not have been digitized by LDS.  This is the ultimate step for genealogy.
  10. Index
  11. Enjoy your work!

Indexing

The advent of internet-based genealogy has made this type of research more accessible today than ever before in history.  Anyone with a computer and internet access can trace their family tree backwards in time.  The reason that this is all possible is through indexing.  Today our records are on the computer.  Back then they were all hand-written.  It is up to us to key the information that had been written down over the centuries into the computer to make it easily and freely accessible to all.  I urge all genealogists to participate in indexing.  My favorite indexing program out there is the one set up by the LDS Church on their website.

You can also index records on your own and submit them to genealogy websites.  Polish genealogy has several sites like this including the Poznan Project, Pomorze, and Geneteka.  I urge all genealogists to actively index and contribute to this body of knowledge because it will help all of us to find our ancestry.