Genealogy Starter Checklist

1. Gather your supplies

• A notebook or family tree app
• Old family papers and photos
• Names and dates from relatives
• Access to free records online

2. Your first project

3. Your first month, step by step

• Week 1: Write down everything you already know. Start with yourself, then your parents and grandparents, filling in names, dates, and places. Gather home sources: old photos, letters, the family Bible, certificates in a drawer. This is your foundation.
• Week 2: Call or visit your oldest living relatives and interview them. Record the conversation if you can, and ask about names, places, jobs, and stories. Memories fade, so capturing them now is the single most valuable thing you can do.
• Week 3: Create a free account on FamilySearch or Ancestry and enter the first four generations of your family. Start with what you know for certain, mark living people as private, and let the site suggest record hints to confirm.
• Week 4: Pick one ancestor and find them in a census record. Notice where they lived, who they lived with, and their occupation. Save the record to your tree and write down where you found it. You are now officially researching.

4. Mistakes to avoid

• Copying other people's online trees without checking the sources. Treat every online tree as a hint, not a fact. Confirm each name, date, and relationship against an actual record before adding it to your own tree.
• Not recording where you found your information. Write a source citation for every fact: which record, which website or book, and when you found it. Future-you will thank present-you.
• Assuming names and spellings were always fixed. Spellings changed constantly, and clerks wrote names as they sounded. Search for variations and think phonetically when a name won't turn up.
• Jumping back too many generations too fast. Work backward one well-documented generation at a time. Skipping ahead is how you end up researching a stranger's family by mistake.
• Keeping everything in one place with no backup. Back up your research regularly to the cloud and an external drive. Years of work can vanish with one failed hard drive.
• Trusting that a record match is your ancestor just because the name fits. Confirm with a second detail, such as age, place, or a family member's name, before you accept a match as truly yours.