Your Family Tree - How to Start Looking for Ancestors
Ancestor Hunting: As a beginner you need to keep it simple. Embarking on an ancestor hunt can be as exciting as looking for buried treasure. For the hunter the early enthusiasm can, however, quickly drain away if early successes are few, and a clear route is not apparent to finding that nugget of information about an ancestor. The sheer enormity of the task may then seem overwhelming. So, as a beginner, keep it simple, and go for the lowest hanging fruit first. A family tree chart should start with you, then branch along to any siblings you have - names, and dates of birth. Then you can consider the connections to your parents, and any brothers and sisters of theirs. This should be easy work, and quickly you will have some solid foundational information on which to move further up the tree to the next generation within the family, and so on. One temptation is to move too fast, and become entangled in the cross branches where there maybe many cousins, including first and second cousins...