It is very tempting when you're researching your family tree to jump ahead of yourself and skip a generation or two. Imagine that you discover a census record for your grandmother living with her husband and children. But wait! You look further down and find her father living in the same household. Just think, you've learned your grandmother's maiden name and her father's name in one fell swoop. You're probably already typing his name into a search box to see what else you can learn! And then there's the tale your grandfather told of his father arriving at Ellis Island as a young man of eighteen with nothing more than the clothes on his back. One of the first things you're going to want to do online is search for him in the Ellis Island database, Right?

Jumping ahead of oneself is human nature. But in genealogy it can also mean disaster. By skipping a generation or two, you run the risk of identifying the wrong people as your ancestors and being tangled forever in someone else's family tree. It happens more frequently than you may think. This doesn't mean you can't pursue a new lead when it smacks you in the face, but after you've done some searching to satisfy your curiosity, go back and finish your research on the previous generation(s) to ensure that everything does indeed match up as you believe. Don't just rely on your grandmother's name and the name of her father. Identify as much as you can about your grandmother, checking all of the available records for anything you can glean. Just learning something as simple as where and when she was born can help distinguish her from others of the same name. Additional research may also provide you with the names of siblings, the birthplace of her parents, her mother's name, and other clues. This way, when you locate records for her parents, you can feel confident that you have correctly identified the next branch in your family tree.