How to Explore Your Family History and Create Your Own Family Tree

If you want to learn more about your family history, creating a family tree can be a great idea and can be made into a treasured painting or document that can be passed down for future generations.  You are likely to discover some interesting pieces of information about your history on your search, but you’ll need to know where to begin.

 

You can start the family tree on a large piece of paper, or even in a graphics software program.  Put your name, as well as the names of your siblings, at either the top or the bottom, and branch them out.  Draw two lines from your name.  Place your parent’s names here, and be sure to use your mother’s maiden family name.  Next, draw to lines from your father’s name and two lines from your mother’s name.  On those lines, you will place the names of your paternal and maternal grandparents.  

 

Continue in this manner, adding cousins and other relatives in the appropriate places.  Make sure that you add the dates of birth and the dates of death next to the names.  Include previous spouses of relatives, or even step-children.

 

Eventually, you will run out of your own family knowledge.  You will then want to start asking questions of your relatives to go further into the past and to other relatives that you never knew existed.  You can visit your local library, who have microfiles dating back to the last century and beyond that may contain local information on your great grandparents.

 

If you hit a dead end, you can find professional researchers that can help with your family tree.  Type ‘genealogy’ into Google and see what pops up.  There are many genealogy firms out there who, for a small sum, will help you unearth fascinating history, names and addresses, and even photos of your ancestors.

 

Now that you know the basics, you might want to learn more about genealogy and how you can delve deeper into your family history.

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