How to Start a Family Tree From Scratch

Work backward, never forward

The single most common beginner mistake is starting from a distant ancestor — a famous name, a family legend, an immigrant — and trying to work forward to yourself. Working forward means guessing among many descendants at every generation. Working backward means each step has exactly one correct answer: every person has one biological mother and one biological father, and your job is simply to identify them with evidence.

So start with yourself. Write down your own full name, birth date, and birthplace. Then your parents: full names (including your mother's maiden name), birth dates and places, marriage date and place. Then their parents. Most people can fill in two generations from memory and stall somewhere in the third. That stall point is where research actually begins.

Empty the living memory first

Records wait; people don't. Before you order a single certificate, talk to the oldest relatives you have. They hold names, places, and connections that may exist in no record at all — which town the family "really" came from, what a grandfather did for a living, who the unnamed woman in the photograph is. A separate guide covers what to ask and how to record it, but the principle belongs here: interviews are the one source that disappears on a schedule you don't control.

One family, one question at a time

Resist the urge to grow the tree in all directions at once. Pick one couple — say, a set of great-grandparents — and one question about them: when did they marry? where was she born? Then go find the one or two record types most likely to answer that question. The record table on the home page is built for exactly this move: question first, record second.

Decide what counts as proof

A tree is only as good as its weakest link, and the weakest links are almost always the ones added on someone else's say-so. Set a personal rule early: every parent-child link and every date gets at least one record behind it — a census listing, a certificate, a church register, a will. When two records disagree (they will), keep both and note the conflict rather than silently choosing.

Write down where every fact came from, even informally: "1930 census, household of ---, viewed at the county library." Future you will not remember, and a fact you can't trace is a fact you can't defend.

A simple system beats an elaborate one

You need three things: a pedigree chart (you at the left, ancestors branching right), a family group sheet for each couple (their facts plus all their children), and a research log (what you looked for, where, and what you found — including nothing). Paper works. A spreadsheet works. Software works. What matters is that every fact has a home and a source.

The first stall points, and what they mean

Most new researchers hit the same walls in the same order: a woman whose maiden name nobody recorded, a surname that shifts spelling between records, and two men with the same name in the same county. Each has its own guide here. None of them means the trail is cold — they mean you've reached the part where method matters more than luck.