Interview Yourself
Why not? You probably know more about your own history than you think you do. You're impatient to jump right on to the Internet to find everything you can on your family, but your search will almost always bring more success if you begin at home — with yourself and your living relatives. Surfing the Internet for information on an average name will bring up somewhere in the neighborhood of a million sites that may shelter tidbits about your family, and who has time to wade through all of that? The more facts you have about your family before you hit the web, the more easily you'll be able to distinguish your ancestors from others with the same name and the less frustrating the search will be.
A journal or notebook can be a handy tool for recording your progress during this fact-gathering stage, including the people you talk to, the questions you ask, the information you collect, and the stories you're told. If you have family members who prefer to write rather than talk, a special memory book full of thought-provoking family history questions may provide just the inspiration they need.
Begin your family tree by writing down as much basic information as you can remember about your relatives. This might include dates and locations of birth, marriage, and death; names of spouses and children; wars in which relatives served; where they went to school; their occupation; their church and/or religion; and any other facts that you can recall. Start with yourself or your children and then work backward through the generations to your parents and grandparents — as far back as you can go. If you can, extend the information to aunts, uncles, siblings, and other family members. Try to remember full names, including middle names, nicknames, and the maiden name for married women. If you know the exact date of an event, write it down. If you only know that it was about 1952 or sometime during World War II, write that down. Everything doesn't have to be perfect. The goal here is just to get something down on paper so that you have somewhere to start.
Create Your First Family Tree
Once you've pulled together every scrap of knowledge from your head and your home, it's time to enter the information into your computer software or a pedigree chart. This helps you see at a glance where you have gaps in your family history knowledge, which in turn can lead to questions to ask your relatives or details to look up online. Be sure to include a source for each piece of information, whether you learned it from a birth certificate or your great uncle. This may seem like a waste of time right now, but you'll appreciate it down the road when you find conflicting information — which you will. Memories are faulty, stories get embellished, and you'll probably find at least one female relative who fudged on her age.
Record Your Personal Story
While you're busy reflecting on the past, it's worth taking some time to record your own story, or at least some of the major events, feelings, and experiences from your own life. It doesn't necessarily need to be done before you dig into your family history, but it's also likely to mean more to your descendants than any family tree you create ever could. It's hard to express how wonderful it is to find a journal or diary written by a long-dead ancestor. Even a simple letter in their handwriting is a treasure. To be able to read about their life in their own words, to learn how the major events experienced only through history books impacted them, to see how the names and dates discovered during research really fit into their life — that is true family history.
A personal history doesn't need to be an entire autobiography. Begin small, with some basics about yourself. Then add more stories over time. Eventually, the plan would be to cover every stage of your life: birth and childhood, family life, school years, courtship and marriage, raising your own family. Touch on all the major points — your job(s), your beliefs, your travels, your hobbies, your favorite foods — asking yourself who, what, when, where, why, and how questions about each. And don't use the excuse that your life is boring! No matter how mundane it may seem to you, a hundred years from now your stories will fascinate your descendants.
The Internet is a great source for writing prompts and inspiration for writing a personal family history, as well as journal-keeping software and services. Subscription services, such as LifeBio (
What if I don't like to write?
Scrapbooking offers an alternative means of sharing your personal or family history. This allows you to use photos to tell much of the story, with short notes, commonly referred to as journaling, to add additional detail. The scrapbooking site at
If you don't want to do your own writing, there are personal historians who will interview you, and your family members if you wish, and then use the collected stories plus photographs to create a video, book, or even family website to publish your personal history. The Association of Personal Historians (
