Getting started is easy but requires some thought.
- Gather photos, documents, family heirlooms.
- Interview relatives.
- Save information on paper in a genealogical chart
- Focus on a single ancestral surname at a time to stay focused
- Recognize that there are often miss-spellings of surnames in historical records.
- Search the internet for surname information, databases, genealogical message boards, How-to genealogical sites
- If possible visit places your family lived to courthouses, cemeteries, churches to find information on legal/land records, gravestones, baptismal records that are not digitized anywhere.
- Organize your information, take notes, and make photocopies to document your information for later more advanced research.