3 Ways to Get Started With Genealogy
Tips for Beginning Your Uncommon Adventure
When we say that genealogy is an underrated hobby, we aren’t kidding! The great thing about genealogy is that it can take any number of shapes and forms. We rarely meet two people who have the same goal when it comes to genealogy. Their adventure is entirely uncommon. It’s uniquely their own. And your journey will be unique, too.
Our outcomes may be wildly different, but thankfully there are a few common places we can start. The type of genealogy work we advocate is much less academic than you will find recommended by others. Some will have you believe that ancestry work is about documenting long lists of names, places, and dates—and then arranging a bunch of pages in a binder and sticking it on the shelf.
This just barely scratches the surface and, let’s be honest, it’s not the most exciting and engaging thing to read if your family is anything like mine.
“You need to produce something that’s hard to put down once someone starts looking through it, like a good book on a rainy day. Imagine your genealogy work sits on your relatives’ coffee tables, looked at by guests and celebrated for it’s collection of interesting research, depth of detail, and imagery.”
With so much potential, it’s hard to know where to begin. Consider focusing first on three key steps: ask and listen, determine the scope, and outline your output.
#1: Ask and Listen: It may sound straightforward, but too many people jump head-first into genealogy research without asking their relatives what they already know. Whether you’re the oldest person in your family or the youngest, find a handful of elderly family members and have a conversation.
Consider asking questions like:
Who is the earliest-born relative you know of or remember? What was their name? When were they born and / or when did they die?
Who do you remember seeing at family events and holidays?
What do you know about our family’s heritage? How did our family arrive at the location where we settled?
These questions open a world of information from the family’s collective memory. Buy a small notebook or journal and record everything you hear. This can be your ‘Genealogy Journal’ where you capture key findings. You may even decide to sketch out a high-level family tree starting with yourself at the center and working back through the generations. This will give you a sense for how many branches you already know versus where you have limited insight.
#2: Determine the Scope: Genealogy can quickly become a cumbersome and overwhelming effort. When you have dozens of research sources, conflicting information, and intertwined details it feels like your work is hitting a wall.
Bring some order before the chaos by clearly defining the scope of your work. What do we mean by scope? Consider what success looks like as part of your genealogy journey. Is success seeing a family tree that stretches back 12 generations to the motherland or are just the 5 generations since your great-grandparents sufficient? Is success having names, dates, and locations in columns on a few pages or do you want to include stories about your family members and the conditions by which they lived?
These are super important and preliminary decisions to make. Feel comfortable asking your family members what they would find most interesting and useful?
You could spend years digging through thousands of databases and books trying to trace your roots to some small village and the year 1400. But you need to ask yourself if having that extensive outline of your history is incrementally more valuable than having your history through, let’s say, 1700 instead. This becomes of your scope and you’re best sticking to it!
#3: Outline Your Output: We’ve commented a time or two in this post about the boring nature of offering up a sheet with names, dates, and locations (if you haven’t figured out by now, we are very much against this ‘traditional’ form of performing genealogy research).
However, we also recognize everyone has their own objective. Want to write a book with your research? Do it. Wish to collect photographs into a photo album and include captions? Focus on that. Want to create a website that contains your tree and family story? By all means!
Whatever your journey, you should go for it. You are 100 percent better off, however, defining what that output looks like at the outset of your genealogy adventure than at some point in the middle. The reason why genealogy always seems to be a temporary hobby and receives a bad rep is because we could easily spend our entire lives building family history outputs. The more definition you can give up front, the easier your path will be toward conclusion.
My first family history work culminated in a book that wrote about the stories of my family starting in about 1790. The family tree was built from about 1866 and forward. The scope and output was super clear, and this allowed me to work iteratively toward my objectives.
Genealogy doesn’t need to be difficult nor overwhelming. It can be an enjoyable hobby that allows you to flex your creative and academic muscles without making anything too complicated.
Start with these three steps, sketch things in your Genealogy Journal, and your next steps become clearer. Remember the best way to make something happen is to quit talking and start doing!