Which should i do first?

Question:Should i start off with just the parents, grandparents,g-grandparents etc..., or should i start with parents and their siblings then grandparents and their siblings etc...? Sometimes it gets really confusing with all the different branches. THANKS!

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: Should i start off with just the parents, grandparents,g-grandparents etc..., or should i start with parents and their siblings then grandparents and their siblings etc...? Sometimes it gets really confusing with all the different branches. THANKS!

Start with yourself and work back, documenting everything. Once you get back to your grandparents, work on one family line. You will probably run into a brickwall eventually. Set that line aside and work on another.

Get as much info from living family as possible. See if there are any old family bibles. Interview your senior family members. Tape them if they will let you. It might turn out they are confused on some things, but what might seem to be insignificant ramblings and story teling might turn out to be very significant. People who do this say they go back a few years later and listen to the tape again and hear things they didn't hear the first time around.

You come from a myriad of family lines and after you get back so far, you just can't work on all of them at the same time.

Parents then grandparents and great-grandparents. Interview, look over albums, chat, and tape record or video if your subject is ok. Ask for legends, stories, and favorite moments. Expect to prove some legends false, some stories that you think were tall tales true, and to find great things through reading old newspapers... Siblings are good to document especially as an aide to go back another generation, and your grandparents siblings are great sources for more stories and photos...

Always but always, work from the most recent, back. This insures your solid foundation that you won't go off working someone else's line. (Been there/done that). As long as you don't try to 'jump' to the immigrant before documenting the later descendants, you should be ok.
That doesn't mean that some lines won't go faster than others. Aside from the programs.. my trick for keeping mentally focused is that I have one 'book' (3 ring binder) that has the core person (me, or husband, either way) as the starting point. I stick to a 4 generation chart for that, AS IF that was all the further I am going to work. With a four generation chart... it will go back to the gr grandparents, which is 8 surnames/ families. Using the standard family group sheets... I file ALL group sheets in alphabetical order by husband's name. I make no effort to sort those, since alphabetical is simplest. It won't change on me.
Mentally, then... each of the 8 gr grandparents become their own project. That person becomes the focal or base person for the notebook for that name. IE Kate Adkins is the core person for my Adkins work. When I am working one notebook, the names related to that, are in that book, mentally and physically.
When I splurge, I'll get the binders that have the clear cover, so I can slip the chart on the front. If I just got a huge box of binders at a yard sale, then the chart is the front page and table of contents. I've been known to use fabric to cover old notebooks, so I know which book is which.
You can choose to work one family... or if somehow, you stumble onto a huge discussion of records for an area that you know your family was in.. you'll 'run' with that. The more time you spend, you'll just know which line is "hot" for the moment, and which one you are brick walled on.
At the risk of getting booed out of the room... I don't have a lot of my work entered in any program. I worked with some excellent researchers early, who never used a computer, but knew where all the info was. They spent more time finding records (and suceeding) than data entry.

From
http://www.tedpack.org/include.html

I agree with [other people who responded] in that who you enter is your choice, but I'm obsessive-compulsive enough to suggest you establish a standard for yourself early on. Many people limit themselves to their direct ancestors, or their children's direct ancestors, or their grandchildren's direct ancestors. Some pick a distant ancestor and try to track down all of his/her descendants. Some people stop when they get to "the immigrant" - the first person in that line to arrive on these shores, longing to breathe free - and pick up another line. (If you are in the UK, that gets tough, because "these shores" would be England and your immigrant ancestor could go back to someone tagging along with William the Conqueror.)

You should decide how far you want to go, based on how much time, money and interest you have in the sport. Then you should set a standard for yourself. If, for instance, you decide you will start with your children's direct ancestors back to the first immigrant to the US in every line, you have to decide if you want:

Children of aunts and uncles. (Albert is your 4th great grandfather. He had siblings Bob, Carol and Dan. Do you include their children?)
Half-siblings (Albert's first wife was Alice, your 4th great grandmother. She died young, he married Zelda, they had five children. Do you include them?)
Children of other marriages. (Zelda was a widow. She had four children by Zachary, her first husband. Do you include them?)
You pretty much have to try for all the children if you try for any of them, or it will look like Alice and Albert only had only one child.

One thing I would suggest - however you limit yourself, try for a spouse for everyone you collect. If you are ever going to publish your work on the Internet, the spouse is the surest way to identify people. Publishing your work on the Internet, in turn, is the fastest way to share your research with others.

If you are not careful, it is also the fastest way to accumulate garbage you can think of; a few genealogists go for quantity instead of quality. They are happy to trade GEDCOM files showing that Charles, Carol's husband, was the second son of a European family that had royal blood and immense wealth. He came to America after being accused of poaching in King's game. (He boiled the Royal Monoply set.) He served as a Colonel in the First Oklahoma Paratroop Regiment during the Civil War and married a Cherokee Princess. All of this has to be true - you're reading it on the computer, aren't you?

Most of us are slow and careful. We'd be happy to share, if our lines intersect. The easiest way to see if they intersect is to find some identifier; birth place or date, marriage date or place, spouse, death date and place. The spouse is the best of the seven, in my experience. Your fourth great uncle by marriage, Bob Peterson, might be my fifth great-grandfather, Robert Petersen. Your Bob was born 3/4/1854, mine 4/3/1845. But, if yours and mine both married Malinda McCorkle, we'd know we should start comparing notes.