What is the best & most reliable & cost effective way of researching you

Question:

What is the best & most reliable & cost effective way of researching your family history?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: When you're just starting, sit down with the older people in your family and get to know what they know. Why reinvent the wheel when they already have the details? Then go to the library in the town where your parents grew up. Look through old phone books, newspapers, directories, biographies, histories of the county and all the great books in the local genealogy section.

I love interviewing distant relatives and writing down all of the stories that people have of my ancestors. It's amazing what people are willing to share. I get shown old photos, newspaper clippings, even a published story about the history of my great-grandmother's family history from 1930 when she was part of a lawsuit over some property in Montreal and had to prove her lineage to the woman who had the property taken away from her in 1710.

The rest of the research comes from there. Sometimes it will be really easy and you'll find a box somewhere with everyone's immigration paperwork and all of the family is written in a family bible. Or sometimes you'll find that your great granddad was a perpetual liar and no one has any clue where he really came from and if his last name was really what it was on his death certificate.

Maybe the best way to put it is it's better to be the keeper of family memories than to be a filler-in-keeper of dates and names that mean nothing to anyone. I loathe the idea of only filling in boxes on a family tree and never getting to know who these people were.