Creating Your Family Tree

This page being edited by Caroline and Velma

Beginning your research

Before you can start constructing your tree, you need to find the branches and twigs to populate it. This page will give you advice on how to go about it and where to find the information, together with hints and tips on deciding whether they are "yours", using The Wiki pages and external links.

Step One ~ Talk To Your Relatives

The first thing to do when you’re starting out is to write down everything you know about your family – names, dates and places of birth, marriages & deaths etc. Ask your relatives for help, especially the older generation, they’re usually a mine of information and stories. Perhaps take a tape recorder along with you to record what they say. Collect together as many old photos, certificates and other family documents you can find. Try to find out the identities of the people in these photos.

Once you’ve collected all of this information and drawn up a simple tree linking them all together, you’re now ready to trace your family back further.

Step Two ~ Going Back Before 1900

You may have been lucky enough to have enough information to take you back to 1901 the year when the latest census to be available to genealogists in it’s entirety was taken. You can search the census from the comfort of your computer chair through subscription sites such as Ancestyr ~ Genealogy and Family History Records and other sites which you can find on Online Research.

Once you find your known relative, look to see who’s living in the same household – brothers, sisters, parents or even grandparents if you’re lucky. Census returns including names etc were taken every 10 years from 1841, so online you have access to 60 years worth of census records. By tracing back through this method it’s usually easy to be able to trace your family back to those born in the 1700’s!

Write all of this new information down. Once you find the census images it’s a good idea to download them to your computer and keep them in a file altogether.

• Census Search

A Visual Guide to Tracking down your ancestors before 1900

• Records Office Guide

Finding Those Names

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• Finding those names

How do you know they "belong" in your tree?

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To be 99% sure that you are researching the correct people, you are going to have to get Birth, Marriage and/or Death Certificates. These pages will help you find out All About Certificates and how to go about obtaining them.

Sorting out those relationships ...

Who is your 5th cousin twice removed? Can first cousins marry? Can a man marry his wife's sister? Is a man allowed to marry his great-grandmother in Scotland?

Find the answers here: Degrees of Kinship

Quick Hints and Tips

• Once you find the census images it’s a good idea to download them to your computer and keep them in a file all together.

• Quick Tips for reseaching your Family History

And when you have found all the information

• How to store it all...