How to Get Started With Your Family Tree (And What Mistakes to Avoid)

Stories are always make fun listening, but how do you get from a story to a family tree?  Thanks to Don Pfister for suggesting this topic.

I’ve been interested in family history since I was a little girl, listening to my grandmother and great aunts tell stories around the dining room table.  Mom told me not to interrupt them, ask questions, or otherwise "bother" them.  My great-aunt Yetta had a copy of the family tree.  Everything was already done. 

Yetta Splaver Berkowitz

Eventually, as that generation started to pass away, I got up my courage and asked Aunt Yetta if I could see the family tree.  She pulled out an old "Copy Max" box that contained two trees.  One was clearly done sometime after 1996 and had a lot of missing pieces.  Who had made the tree?  Who provided the information?  When was it created?  There were very few dates saying when someone was born, died, or married.  Too many people were simply rectangles with "unknown" or "unnamed."  If I was lucky, there might be a first name or a surname.  There were a few obvious mistakes, such as getting my mother's name wrong.  While this was a good place to start, it was also a great example of how NOT to do a family tree!

A piece of the original Splaver family tree

I should have learned the importance of documentation from this tree, but I didn't.  Instead, it inspired me to start asking questions.   Memories (especially mine) aren't particularly reliable, so I started taking notes. You can jot down notes or type as someone is talking, but I found myself saying things like "hold on while I write this down" which really got in the way of the flow of the conversation.   Eventually, I realized the best way is to record the interview (with their permission, of course). Getting permission isn't just the ethical thing to do.  In many states it's against the law to record someone without the consent of all people being recorded. If you have a smart phone, it should have voice recording software built in. Another nice thing about smart phones is that people don't feel self-conscious around them since they are pretty much everywhere in our society. Don't be surprised if you both forget that you’re recording!  I like to start the conversation with something silly like "Today is September 7, 2016 and I'm interviewing the AMAZING [insert name here] and her fabulous daughter [insert name here]!"  It always gets a laugh and is a good way to get people to relax, while still documenting who is in the conversation.

The next problem is what do you do with the recording once you have it.  I hear all kinds 

of stories about people with boxes of random photos and documents.  It's exciting  to open up a treasure box of old papers and pictures.  I've opened up many as I meet with family members, but it's really hard to make sense of it all.   I needed something to organize everything.  Initially,  I started out with binders of people and family groups, but found that things were still getting lost.  Did I put the wife with her husband or her parents? At what point did I spin someone off into their own binder? And, of course, there were always those papers that fit in multiple places. What was I going to do with those?  After a while, I had several shelves with binders, each "organized" slightly differently, and I still couldn't find ANYTHING!

I needed something that grouped people together in multiple ways where I could associate documents with multiple people, so that I would find it no matter how I looked for it.  Eventually, I chose FamilyTreeMaker because it was easy to use and I could use it to organize electronic copies of everything that I had – documents, photos, videos, and of course those audio interviews.

While I was busy taking notes and scanning photographs, one of the things I didn't know to do (and really regret that I didn't do) was to write down where everything (including photos) came from.  I wish I knew who had the original photo that I know simply as "Belle Glassman and her brothers."  Knowing who had those photos might help me understand who kept in touch with that branch of the family and lead me to where there descendants are now!  Also, technology has greatly improved since I first started collecting photos.  It would be great to go back to the owners and re-scan the images at a higher resolution.  Also, if you want to get into things like Photo Genealogy (see

Sherlock Cohn) or photo restoration, it's best to scan at the highest resolution possible.  I just couldn't do that in the days when I needed to haul the photo albums down to the nearest Kinkos! 

Belle Glassman and her brothers

The next big decision I had to make once I moved into the electronic world was do I put it online?  There is a huge movement out there to make things accessible.   There are many advantages to online trees.  They're automatically backed up.  It makes it incredibly easy for people to find you.  They can be accessed from anywhere.  Of course, there are also some distinct disadvantages.  One of the problems I started to experience was that I was tainting my sources.  People's memories would start to merge with information I had given them until (in some cases), I found that people were repeating my own speculations back to me as their memories!!!!  The same thing happens with family trees.  You can see information on someone else's tree and think "Great!  They have this too, so it must be correct" when, in fact, someone else had simply copied the information from your online tree.  You have no way of knowing who has copied your tree, whether the information is being used correctly, or how to correct something that later turns out to be a mistake.  

I can't tell you the number of times I've seen whole sections of trees grafted onto someone's family tree for no better reason than "I just found a tree with Louis Goldman from Chicago.  I have a Louis Goldman from Chicago.  There can't possibly be two Louis Goldmans of about the same age who were from the same town.  This must be a part of my family!"  (This reasoning is why it's all but impossible for me to research my great-great grandfather Isadore Kaplan.  There were, in fact, two Isadore Kaplans who were about the same age and immigrated to Cleveland within a couple of years of each other!)

What are some of your tips, tricks, and things to avoid?  Please let me know in the comments.