Whether you’ve been a genealogist for a few days or many years, there’s always something new to learn or some tips to pick up.
1. Don’t believe every family story
The phrase «one feather for five chickens» hasn’t come about for nothing.
Some family history is hushed up and others are distorted to suit the living.
2. Record name, location and year on family photos
Here, the oldest images are most important, but newer images also need
to have vital information written down. Descendants may appreciate
this work even more.
3. List source references
This may not always feel as important, but sometimes you need to
seek out previous sources. Then it’s good to know where the information
comes from. Anything you can document where all the genealogical information
comes from also helps to strengthen the credibility of your work.
4. Take the age given in older censuses with a pinch of salt
In the past, people were not as aware of their own age as they are now.
Giving round numbers was therefore easy if you didn’t know whether you
were 39 or 41 years old.
5. Check the information you have against primary sources
It’s easy to resort to secondary sources such as village books and the work of others. It’s just as easy to quickly add 10, 20 or 100 new names when you find a family branch in such a source. Hopefully the information is correct, but take the time to check it against primary sources (if possible).
6. Get out and away from your PC
Searching for ancestors in the sources can be very exciting, and we all know the tingling feeling in our stomachs when the name we’ve been looking for turns up. However, you’ll get the same tingling feeling when you visit the places where your family lived for the first time. The buildings they lived in may have been demolished, but the river that runs past has also been watched by your ancestors.
7. Enter family names in a family tree
Make your family lines visible via a genealogy board or family tree. Too many people keep their family information on a PC or a website. By visualizing your family in a family tree or a genealogical chart, you will get a different overview of your ancestors.
8. Write a genealogy book
There may come a day when you either don’t spend so much time on genealogy anymore or someone else inherits your material. For your work to live on, it needs to be systematized into a presentable format. Through a genealogy book, your work is guaranteed to live on for a long, long time.
9. Create timelines
Timelines help you get an overview of a person or family’s life. It can either focus only on events directly related to the person(s) in question, but perhaps even more fun is to look at what was happening in society at the same time. What local, national and/or international events did our ancestors experience?
10. Make backups
Whether you’re working with pen and paper, via cloud-based services like MyHeritage or via closed genealogy programs that only you have access to. Point 10 is our most important tip. Make regular backups. Your home can burn down, PCs and servers can crash or be hacked. You never want to feel that years of work and collected material have been lost.
