Starting a Family Tree

The following rules, tips, principles and guidelines will help towards a painless start, whatever approach you want to take to family history. More important, they will provide the right foundation for a pleasurable, long-term interest in the subject that will more than reward your time and effort.

• Work backwards. You may well have a famous ancestor but you can never be sure until you have made the connection in a 'tree' that connects to your mum or dad. Add a 'great' to your great-grandparent and one more 'great' at a time. The more recent the records are, the more reliable and legible they will tend to be. You will therefore meet the joys of funny spelling and handwriting gradually as you work further back in time.
• Have a method. Any method is better than none when it comes to keeping records. Just bear in mind that ancestry records grow like Topsy, like twigs and leaves on a tree as compared with its single trunk and few main branches, so you will need spare capacity in every part of your recording system. Make these common sense principles more than good ideas, but part of your routine way of tracking, recording and filing information.
• Do as much as you can before you arrive at a record office, such as preparing separate sheets for different records or types of records. You will save valuable time you can spend instead on actual transcription during your limited time with the source documents.
• Transcribe data exactly as you find it. This rule applies also to layout, such as the order of columns of a census form. You will soon become familiar with layouts of registers and certificates, so a different, personal layout will be confusing later. Transcribe errors and all.
• Don't go off at tangents. Old records can be so intriguing that you are tempted to pursue anything of interest, even if it is not part of your family history aims. Suddenly the afternoon is gone and you realise you haven't got half of what you set out to get. Stay focused.