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Tracing your Family Tree

Tracing your family tree can seem like a daunting task, here are some basic steps that will assist you in starting, and hopefully lead you on to many years of interesting research.

Starting with the basics

Before you try and find out information from all sorts of sources sit back and write down what you know already as these facts are just as important as any others. The information that you already have probably includes the names, birth dates and birthplaces of your close relatives, along with other facts that you may know These might include:

What date you were born
Where you were born
Your parents/brothers/sisters birth dates and possibly where they were born
Your brothers/sisters wives and husbands names, birth dates, birth places
Your brothers/sisters childrens names, birth dates, birth places etc
Medical conditions of your close relatives
Stories and memories shared by other members of the family

Basically it does not matter how little information you can gather - it is all important and can be the beginnings of a huge family tree in time. Do not rely on your own memory to store all these facts as sooner or later you will not be able to remember or may get things mixed up.

The secret is to record all of the information that you gather so that it can be correlated, checked and never be forgotten. Remember to not only record the information but also where the information has come from, for example work of mouth from your parents, newspaper article (Which newspaper? What date was it published? etc) as this can all be useful in further research.

Don't forget that you will also want to check for previous research about your family, as someone else might have done a lot of the work for you already. Be careful, however as you will still need to check research received from someone else, as it is always possible that they have made a mistake.

Remember that you might also have photographic evidence - that old black and white photograph at your grandmas' house, "who is the other person in the photo"?

Organising your information

It is possible that not all of the information that you will immediately be able to gather will fit neatly together so it is vitally important that you decide how to store all of the information.

Organising and filing of the information is vitally important and is the key to successful research and there is no better time to start filing and organising your information than right at the beginning. It might seem a little pointless to do this at the beginning, but if you do you will get yourself into the habit of filing the information. Then when you suddenly realise that you have a huge amount of information from a wide variety of sources you know where it all is.

The hardest part of organising and filing your data is to work out the best way of filing it all. The answer to the question 'what is the best way of filing' can not really be answered as it all depends on the individual in question, however it is possible to suggest a number of pointers that might lead to you working out your best method.

You must decide in what order to file your notes. The most common way is to organise them alphabetically by surname with a section for each individual. This section could contain any information that you have collected for a particular individual. You might also want to include any other documentation such as wills, photos, or certificates. For documents that you want to store somewhere else, insert a page into your files noting the name of that document, its content, and current location. You might decide that all of your information be filed in one file or you have separate files for Birth Certificates, Death Certificates, Wills, etc. Whatever method you choose is totally up to you.

Remember that your system can change as time goes by and you collect more information, as long as the information is in a known order it is easily changed later on. For example you might start off filing all the information in one folder, but then as the volume of information increases decide to move certificates to another folder.

Storing your information

Remember that as well as organising and filing your information it is also vitally important that you think long and hard about the best place to store your file(s). Wherever you decide to locate your data (in folders, a filing cabinet, etc.) you should make sure that they are easy to get to, orderly and safe most importantly from damage.

Some of the information that you collect (for example old photographs) might well be impossible to replace if they get damaged or lost. For this reason storing all you hard work in and old box on the floor might not be the best thing to do.

Folders are nice, compact places to keep genealogical information because they're easy to transport to libraries or other places where you do your research. However, if you have stacks of information, you may want to use a filing cabinet to organise it all, and then just take individual file folders to the library with you again this is up to you to work out the way that suits your way of working.

Using technology to help you

Tracing your family tree will inevitably mean that you will have a lot of information to correlate and store and there is no doubt that technology can aid you with this. However I would personally suggest that you do not immediately run out and purchase a computer and one of the numerous packages to aid in the logging of family data.

Even if you do use technology to aid you it is still vitally important to have you manual filing system in place, the two should work together and not replace the other one.

With the price of computers, printers, scanners, digital cameras etc getting cheaper by the day it is quite possible to have a reasonable set up in any household. Technology can also help you in keeping some of your more fragile pieces of history available for all further generations to enjoy. Scanning of old photographs and documents means that you will have to handle the original very infrequently. This also means that should you have to take your data somewhere else you reduce the risk of loosing the originals.

There is a vast number of programs, both commercial and shareware, available to help you in the process of storing your data and the drawing of your family tree. Which one is suitable for you depends on you as an individual, my only recommendation would be to ensure that the program you use can export and import in GEDCOM format. GEDCOM is a standard method of sharing genealogy information - therefore should you want to move to a different software package you should not have any real difficulties in doing so.

My personal preference is 'Family Tree Maker' by Broderbund Software. This program is fairly powerful allowing you to store scanned documents in scrapbooks for individuals, medical histories, personal data etc, print numerous different reports and views of your data and tree. With all of this it still has a very simple interface for entering the personal data.

I do suggest that you try and use a few different programs and see which one suits you best, see if any of the companies offer free trial versions or if any of your friends or family already use a package.

Using other sources to help you

There are a vast number of books that detail various methods of research and might help you in the tracing of your family tree research. Remember that people who have already gone through the process and have made mistakes themselves write the majority of these books.

Although some of the information given might seem obvious reading about other peoples mistakes could save you wasting a huge amount of your time researching the wrong information. I know of people who have researched for years down a branch of a tree only to find out later that they had made a simple mistake and had not been researching their tree at all.

One of the best places I have found for books online is Amazon. Here you can search for books containing the information you want, order them online in total safely and have them delivered to your door and usually for cheaper than you could have bought the book at your local book store.

Looking further a field

Once you have correlated all the information you can about your immediate family, have sorted out your filing system and read books on researching your family tree you will then want to try to expand your tree by digging further into the past.

This is where the real research, enjoyment and frustration starts, but before you rush out of the door to dig around you need to make a few decisions. Family trees are huge by their nature, just think of yourself. You have two parents, each parent has two parents (your grandparents), and each of those has two parents (your great grandparents). So by going back just three generations from you there are already fifteen people in the tree. The example also assumes that everyone is a single child, that no-one married more than one (because of being divorced or a death of their previous partner), that no-one was adopted and so on and so on. You can see how before long there are a huge number of branches that you can possible research.

You might decide that you only want to try to research one particular branch of your family tree for the time being - you can always come back and research another of the branches at a later date. To start with, you may want to choose a branch about which you have very little information, or you can choose a branch about which you have several generations of information, and try to find even more. It's all up to you. Once you've chosen a branch to start out with, stick with it for a while to see how far back you can go. Be realistic, and remember that it's not always easy to find information; it may take some time and effort.

There is nothing stopping you researching more than one tree at a time, sometimes it might make more sense to do so. For example say you have traced a particular individual and are making a trip specifically to find out information on that individual it makes sense to research other possible links while you are there - saving you time and money and possibly finding more links along the way.

You should also decide what information you want to collect on the individuals in your tree, you should at least be collecting the basic facts, such as names, birth dates, marriages dates, and death dates. These are the kinds of things that you'll find in vital records, church records, and in family Bibles.

You might also decide to gather more personal information on the individuals, such as what jobs they had, what they did for recreation, their religion, the history and geography of the place where those ancestors lived, etc. Basically the quantity of information that you collect is totally up to you, there are no hard and fast rules in stone.

You should, however, be realistic and the further back you manage to trace your tree the harder it will be to find extra information on the individuals.

To finish with

I hope that the information contained here has given you an insight into tracing you family tree and has assisted you in thinking about the methods and information you can collect. All that I can say is happy hunting and good luck.

If you are researching a Heneghan family tree or a family tree containing Heneghans then feel free to add your tree to the Heneghan Family Tree pages here on Heneghan.com.

Remember that the sharing of information can help someone else find information that they are missing and visa versa. The more information people share the easier the research will be for another Heneghan trying to trace their tree.

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