Starting with What You Know

Genealogists have one rule that saves beginners months of frustration: start with yourself and work backward, one generation at a time. Jumping straight to a famous person who shares your surname is the most common mistake. Your first sources are already in your home and in your relatives’ memories.

Start with yourself

Write down what you know for yourself, your parents and your grandparents: full names, dates and places of birth, marriage and death. Leave blanks where you don’t know. The blanks become your research plan.

Three habits from the start will keep your records clear:

• Record women by their maiden names. It’s how you’ll find them in records from before their marriage.
• Write dates as day, month, year: 12 Mar 1921. Nobody will mistake it for 3 December.
• Write places from smallest to largest: Scranton, Lackawanna, Pennsylvania, USA. Include the county; that’s where most records were kept.

Search the house

Before you go online, look through closets, drawers, attics and the boxes nobody has opened in years. Ask relatives to look too. You’re hunting for:

• Family Bibles, which often have births, marriages and deaths written in the front pages
• Photographs, especially anything written on the back
• Letters, postcards and diaries
• Certificates: birth, baptism, marriage, death, naturalization
• Obituaries, funeral cards and newspaper clippings
• Military papers such as discharge certificates and medals
• School records, yearbooks and report cards
• Deeds, wills, recipe books and scrapbooks

Handle originals gently. Photograph or scan them before you do anything else, and don’t pull photos off old album pages if they’re stuck. Note where each item is kept and who owns it. If you’d like a way to record who wants which keepsakes, try our heirloom request list.

Interview your relatives

Talk to your oldest relatives first. Every year we wait, some stories are lost for good.

• Ask permission to record. A phone’s voice memo app is fine. (More options in Top 5 Ways to Preserve Family History with Audio.)
• Bring photos. They unlock memories better than any question.
• Ask open questions that can’t be answered with yes or no, and let silences sit. The best stories often come after a pause.
• Ask “How do you know?” Was the speaker there, or did they hear it from someone else?
• Write down who told you, and when.

Questions that work well:

1. What were your parents’ and grandparents’ full names?
2. Where did they live, and why did they move?
3. What did they do for work?
4. What was an ordinary day like when you were a child?
5. What holidays and traditions did the family keep?
6. Who was the family storyteller? What stories did they tell?
7. Is there a story about where our family came from?
8. What hard times did the family go through?
9. Do you have photos, letters or papers I could copy?
10. Who else should I talk to?

When memories disagree

They will. One aunt says Grandpa was born in 1919 in Ohio; an uncle insists it was 1920 in Pennsylvania. Don’t pick a winner yet. Write down both versions and who said each one. Conflicting stories aren’t a problem; they’re clues, and Part 3 shows you how records can settle them.

Write down every source

A source is simply where a piece of information came from. Even a conversation is a source:

Interview with Mary Jensen (granddaughter of Anna Novak), 14 Mar 2026, by phone; recording in my files.

Put a source next to every fact you record. Family stories are precious, but treat them as clues to check rather than proof. Six months from now you won’t remember where a date came from unless you wrote it down. (Our lesson on citing your sources has more examples.)

Build your first tree and a research plan

Put what you’ve gathered into a family tree: on paper, in genealogy software, or in a free online tree such as FamilySearch. Keep your own copy wherever your tree lives.

Then look at the blanks for the person you chose in Part 1, and turn each one into a question with a place to look:

That short list is your research plan. Part 3 shows you where those records are and how to search them.