nyelphaba

I would love to do genealogy for my family, but I do not know where to begin. Really, how do you begin?

bakermom

i've been dabbling in it off and on for years.I found some interesting stuff on the ellis island site.
Had a trial subscription to ancestery.com for a while but it was too pricey for me to keep. i did find some of the old family stories, well, aren't quite as we were led to believe.

wanda lou

I love it also.

jitkaau

I find the cost of using the sites rather prohibitive - especially when you may pay for the wrong records and reach a dead end.

carolaug

I also do genealogy - I did alot more when I was not working. You find the most info from relatives...not always easy to get them to share...but mostly because they are so busy working. You can go to the library and search on their computers for free...ancestry.com, familysearch.org, findagrave.com - I have gone there and used ancestry but you have to be in the library...I ended up signing up. You can pay by the month...and download what you find. Worth the small cost or no cost if you go to the local library.

Panchita

Nyelphaba - you begin with what you know. Seriously. Do a tree of all of your relatives as you know them, with full names, dates and places of birth / death.

Then move on to speaking with other members of the family who might be able to add to this - older members are very useful, but don't overlook the possibility that younger ones may have done some research (or just know more info than you do at this point). Don't concentrate too hard on just going backwards - often you need to know about siblings in order to confirm that a person you have found is the one you want!

Once that is done you can start using research from the Internet and/or local registry offices to work your way backwards and sideways.

Good luck - it is a lot of fun, and you can find out all sorts of useful/interesting snippets of information

lindy

I dabble on and off. I love it when I find stories about my family. I did follow my mother's side (with help) back to a grandfather 5 generations back and became a member of Daughters of the American Revolution in '09.

Treasureit

I have used a couple different programs to store this information. A couple are so obsolete that I would have to have an old old computer to open them....a problem with upgrading technology. I used "My Heritage" - a free program on line...(they also suggest you join the site), for some family info I needed to organize for an event a couple years ago. I liked it ok.

Bobbielinks

One of my DIL are interested in family history. She has many questions, but I don't know where to start. Could someone please give me an idea on where to start and is there a "form" to keep track of relative names, dates and stories?

sewmuchmore

I have done some genealogy and found that the court house have so much information. Go though old court cases. you will find a lot of information that way. Churches has a lot of information also. Found a couple of my Greats grandfathers were Preachers.Got their childern names.