Family Search - Key Items to Remember

This article discusses key items to remember when you are conducting a family search for your ancestry. Researching your family tree history can be very rewarding but also very time consuming. We will try to cover some of the genealogy search tricks and techniques that can increase your success rate to trace those elusive ancestry details and develop the roots for your trees.

Someone once said "Fail to Plan...Plan to Fail". Start your genealogy search sessions with a very specific plan for the history information that you want to find. Review the family ancestry and trees of the target that you are trying to trace. Look at their tree especially their children and parents. Try to understand the common first names that seem to appear in the generation before as well as after the target generation. Many times, when we review our roots documentation, we see that children are named for important family members like, aunts and uncles, grandparents and even great grandparents.

Take some time to get an understanding of the genealogy and trace the history of the region that the target was born in. Did the target family just move to a new county or new country? Did the target just get married? If so, what region did the spouse's family reside in? Think of other relevant roots questions and write them down. Build a list of ancestry questions that you can use every time that you carry out a family search for your trees. Review that list of questions to see that it is as complete as possible, tailored to your tree, history and particular needs.

If you are conducting the roots search over the internet then make sure that you record down all the genealogy websites that you visit for each tree. Make a note of the useful ones at finding your roots for any of your trees as well as the ones that didn't work out. With this history, you can skip the sites that are not useful and concentrate your time on the ones that provide the most successful trace and are best at uncovering your ancestry.

If you are attending a local library or newspaper archive make sure that you take all of the relevant genealogy and roots information that you can. This includes specific details on the trees you are trying to trace. Make sure that the version of the family tree software that you use on your laptop is up-to-date with all the latest ancestry information from your desktop. Be sure to perform a backup before you leave home in case of unrecoverable errors.

While you are collecting the history information about your search target make sure that you record all of the details about the source you find. It's not enough to know another name on a tree or trace another genealogy date and the title of the book or article that you found it in. You need to know the author of the book, the publisher, the publication date, the page number, the ISBN (if it's from a book), the date and time you recorded it. Each of these elements seems trivial now. However, if you do obtain conflicting information later you will be able to better judge the validity of both sources and determine which version you think is most reliable for your trees. Without this information determining the validity of your source will require a lot more effort and time.

For more information, visit genealogy.

About The Author:

Richard Kearns is a successful author and regular contributor to http://www.all-about-family-trees.com.