How to make a family tree: step by step

The usual reason a family tree never gets started is the feeling that you should “prepare properly” first. You do not need to prepare at all. You need one phone call.

Step 1. Write down what you already know

Open a notebook or your phone’s notes and write out everything you can recall unaided: yourself, your parents, your grandparents. Names, years, towns.

It takes ten minutes and immediately shows two things — how much you already have, and where the dark begins. Usually it begins at the great-grandparents.

Step 2. Interview the oldest relatives you can reach

Living people are the most valuable source and the only one that disappears for good.

Start with the oldest relative you can talk to. Do not open with “tell me about our family” — that makes people freeze and answer “what’s there to tell”. Ask narrow questions instead:

• What were your parents’ full names?
• Do you remember their parents’ names at all?
• What was your mother’s maiden name?
• Where was the family from — which village, which region?
• Where did you live, where did you move and why?
• What work did people do?
• Who served in the war? Who did not come back?

Always ask for maiden names. Without them the maternal line stops dead at the first generation — and that is half your family.

Record the conversation. You will not write fast enough to keep up, and in twenty years the voice will matter more than the transcript.

If the conversation stalls, bring out photographs. “Who is that next to you?” works nearly every time: people start recalling the circumstances, and everything else comes out with them.

Step 3. Search the house before you search an archive

Before writing to any records office, go through what relatives already have in their cupboards:

• birth, marriage and death certificates;
• employment records, diplomas, military service documents;
• war-time letters and notifications, medal citations;
• household registers and residence records;
• photographs with writing on them.

Photograph everything on the spot. The original stays with its owner and you get a copy that will not be lost in a house move or fade in a window.

Check the backs of photographs. Dates and names turn up there more often than people expect.

Step 4. Search the free records online

Many countries now have free, searchable indexes of civil registration, census returns and military service. If an ancestor served, wartime databases often list a birth year and place, a spouse’s name and a home address — confirmation and a lead in the same record.

This is the fastest way to get documented facts without leaving the house.

Step 5. Write to records offices and archives

Then comes the official part.

Civil registration offices hold births, marriages and deaths, in most countries from the nineteenth or early twentieth century onwards. To get records of direct ancestors you usually need to prove your relationship, which means a chain of documents leading from you to them.

Regional and municipal archives hold what came before: parish and mosque registers, census and household lists, tax rolls. This is the route back into the nineteenth century.

In your request state clearly:

• who you are looking for — the full name;
• what record you need — birth, marriage, death;
• when — a year, or at least a range;
• where — the settlement, district and region;
• your relationship and the documents that prove it.

Expect to wait weeks or months, and expect some replies to say nothing was found. Records burned, were lost, were moved. A negative answer is still a result: it closes off a direction.

Step 6. Put it all into a tree

By now you will have a pile of different things: notes, photographs, certificates, voice recordings. While it lives in a notebook and a Downloads folder it is not yet a family history — only you can navigate it, and not for long.

Put the people into a tree where each one has their own record: dates, places, photos, stories, and where the information came from. Then the gaps become visible and you can see what to chase next.

A digital tree beats a paper one for three practical reasons, none of them about being modern: it rearranges itself when you add someone, you can share it with relatives, and it does not vanish along with a single notebook.

What not to do

• Starting with the archive. While you wait for a reply, living memory is going.
• Writing approximate dates as if they were facts. A wrong year sends you hunting for a document that does not exist.
• Mixing facts and family legend. Record the legends too, but label them as legends.
• Keeping it all to yourself. A family history known to one person ends with that person.

Start tonight

Call the oldest relative you have and record the conversation. That is the first step; everything else grows out of it.

To keep what you gather from dissolving, add people to iRitual: the tree lays itself out, each person holds photos and stories, and for those who have passed you can save the coordinates of the burial place. Free, for iOS and Android.