Your Interactive Guide: Essential Steps for Beginners - cont.
Inform Family Members About Your Project
Call or write all important family members
to let them know you plan to do the family’s genealogy and you pray for their
cooperation in this important project. Use your family reunion address book for
this task. While you are writing, ask a close family member to be your partner,
preferably in the state where ancestors lived.
Collect and Copy Your Family Records
Collect and copy all of your own
(immediate) family’s records -- birth marriage, and death certificates as well
as other records. Then move back to that of your parents’ generation and your
grandparents’ generation. This step will take some time if you don’t live in
the place where they live. A visit might be necessary. Your grandparents’
generation should have more records than your own immediate family has, but they
might be dispersed among family members who now live all over the country. Items
such as old funeral programs, employment records, photos, bible entries, school
or military records, deeds, and wills should begin to show up. This stage is
often combined with family interviews.
Your First Interviews
Create an address book of all your
relatives, in-laws included, who are 50 years old and over. These are the people
you will interview first. Interviewing family members is an on-going process.
This first set of questions should be considered preliminary followed up by more
detailed interviews over a longer period of time. Note that the interviews might
occur at the same time that you collect and copy records.
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