Creating a Family Tree?

Question:I want to create a family tree. Can anyone advise me where I should start or what resources are available?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: I want to create a family tree. Can anyone advise me where I should start or what resources are available?

Family Tree research is generally claimed to be the third-biggest searched for thing on the internet besides Sex/Porn and Star Trek/Science Fiction. The amount of things you can do on the internet is growing exponentially day-by-day, but just like all the sex sites which claim to be free, most of the better genealogy sites are not free either - you generally have to pay. Even if you register for free at somewhere like http://www.genesreunited.co.uk, you still actually have to pay to contact anyone and view their trees.

First of all though, you need some kind of tree of your own, so you have to sit down with a piece of paper and starting with yourself put down all the details of your family you are sure of - your parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters and aunts and uncles etc. Sooner or later, you'll come unstuck, probably well before the year 1901. If granny is still alive and has all her marbles, maybe you can ask her, but it's just as likely at this point that if you want to get any further back into the past beyond living memory that you will need to find and order the appropriate birth, marriage and death certificates.

It's probably best right from the beginning to keep proper records on a dedicated database, and the Mormons free Personal Ancestral File (PAF) software downloadable from http://www.familysearch.org is a great program for beginners and you can later download the files to genesreunited or tribalpages to publish your tree online. If it is online, then other people can find you, or more importantly, you can find other people. You'd be very unlucky if you didn't find at least one second or third cousin already on the internet somewhere doing at least one branch of your tree.

This question or one like it gets asked on Y/A almost every day, and put simply, once most people discover the level of time, effort and money that is needed to create a tree, they just can't be bothered. Many seem to have been deluded by the BBC TV show "Who Do You Think You Are?" into thinking that it is incredibly easy, and all one has to do is walk into Somerset House or somewhere (a place that hasn't existed for many many years now) and someone will go down to the basement for you and bring up a file with your complete family history on it. Alas, it doesn't work like that.

If you really want to find your ancestors then you have to start reading about how the system works in the part of the world that you plan on researching. The English and Welsh system is not terribly hard to explain, but does require plenty of work to understand. You won't be able to use the internet effectively (the 1841-1901 censuses at Ancestry for example) until you at least are able to find one ancestor who was alive during this period. Anything else more recent than this will be very hard to find indeed, especially if you want to get hold of your grandfathers war service record - things like that have to be done the hard way, in post or in person.

If you plan on getting anywhere at all with your research, be prepared to spend many hundreds of pounds in the process. None of it will come cheap. Your best investment right now would be one of many books on the subject. They come in all kinds of levels from the complete beginner to expert, so before you dive right in off the deep end, sit back a moment and read a bit about how it all works. Then you can get out there and do it. The more old documents you order and read, the better you get.

I would start with ancestry.com. They have a great user interface and if you are willing to pay a little money they have access to tons of information to help you put together a family tree.

You could try www.familysearch.org it's completely free to use and its excellent, you can get a free trial with www.ancestry.com which is the best as far as I'm concerned.
Hope this helps you get started.

I think TribalPages.com is the best!