Getting Started
Tracing your genealogy and family history can be a delightful trip into the records and collective memories that have shaped your own background - or a runaway train lurching through a colossal and uncharted mine of information. You can keep this pursuit both manageable and pleasurable by starting out with a clear idea of what you want to achieve.
Don't panic!
At the outset, genealogy and family history can seem scarily complicated. Family trees can rapidly run completely out of control: to cover every member of every generation, and their ancestors and offspring, you'll need a piece of paper the size of a roll of wallpaper. If you trace back your ancestry through only your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and so forth, in just ten generations you'll have a list of 511 people - and that does not include any brothers and sisters, cousins, uncles and aunts.
Then there is the barrage of documentation that you might have to sift through - all the things that genealogists need and thrive on: certificates of birth, marriage and death, census records, parish registers, military records, wills, and so on. Don't panic! There are simple, well sign-posted paths through his chaos.
Make a plan
What you have to do, first and foremost, is to define your goals. Ask yourself: what exactly do I want to know? Do you just want to find out a bit more about the lives of past generations: what they did for a living, whom they married, how they fit into the family tree of your close relatives? Or do you want to discover your ancestry deep back in time - to take your family tree as far back as you can get? Or do you perhaps want to check out a link to some famous (or perhaps notorious) ancestor, to whom - according to family legend - you are supposed to be linked? Each of these tasks requires a slightly different approach and focus.
Limit your task, and remember your original objective as you go forward. It is very easy to become bogged down by detail. But be prepared to be flexible: bear in mind that your researches can lead you to unexpected places or people, and so if you are too focussed or prescriptive you can lose out on some of the fun!
Start with what you know
You and your relatives already know far more about your family history than any other source. Ask them if they have their own records that you can look at: photos; family Bibles (often the place where family records were kept in the past); certificates of birth, marriage and death; letters; diaries; newspaper clippings. Where are the family graves: what is written on them?
Work backwards
At an early stage you should start sketching out your family tree (see Genealogy and Family Trees). As a rule, when researching, work backwards in time, from what you know of the present and immediate past. If you start with a supposed distant ancestor and work forward in time to try to prove a link with yourself, you are very likely to end up researching someone else's family history!
Has it been done before?
It is possible that much of the legwork for your family history has been done before - by some forebear sharing your curiosity. If so, you could save yourself a huge amount of time and effort. Ask your relatives if they know of any such work. Lists of family histories (such as privately printed histories, or manuscripts) are held by various bodies, and are catalogued in books such as 'The Genealogist's Guide', which may be available in your local public library.
In addition, there may well be someone who is currently doing a family history that covers the same ground as yours, or which overlaps. Again, you could get wind of this by contacting relatives. Or you might find this out by using the most powerful modern tool in genealogy: the Internet (see Using the Internet).