A Family Tree Is A Priceless Gift To Hand Down To Your Descendants - Your Ancestry Is Your Heritage - Wouldn’t It Be Great To Have It All Documented In A Clear And Concise Manner That You Could Pass On All The Information To Your Future Generations?
Tracing your family history can be a fun, rewarding hobby that connects you with your past — and brings you closer to your present family. Who wouldn’t want to learn more about themselves - where they came from, who their ancestors were and what they were like? But when people hear the word “genealogy,” it brings to mind, dusty books, dry statistics and many daunting hours of research work.
There are many options online to research your ancestry, download templates for making family trees and you can even hire a professional genealogist to do all the work for you, but if you just want to have some fun and treat this as a hobby, or if this is a project you need to do for school, then follow the steps below.
In the column on the right, under links, you can find great resources and connections to help you build your family tree if you want to complete it in a more professional way.
Making a family tree can be a big project and may even seem overwhelming. But if you break the process down into bite size pieces, it won’t seem quite so daunting.
There are two steps to completing a family tree. The first one is to find out facts about your family; and the second one is to organize and create your tree…
Step 1:
For this you will need index cards. Use the index cards to make a record for each member of your family, starting with yourself. On each person’s index card write down the following things…
- Name - include first, middle, and last names (if you know them). If the person changed his or her name at some point, you can write down the earlier name too.
- Date of birth - month, day, and year, (or just as much as you can find out).
- Date of death - (if they have passed away).
- Notes/Comments - Any extra information you want, for example the person’s nickname, or birthplace, or physical appearance, like hair or eye color, What profession they were in, or hobby they enjoyed, if they emigrated and where to and where from etc.
When you have completed making cards for yourself and the family members you know well, see how many cards you can make for people from your extended family. That could include your aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, etc. Now is the time to take on the role of a private investigator. Ask a parent or other family member to help you. Is there someone who knows a lot about the family? Someone who has written down
family stories you can read? Someone who has organized a family reunion? Get the inside scoop on as many family members as you can.
After that, the next thing to do is to make a new index card for each important event that connects people. These can include marriages, births, adoptions, divorces, family events, etc. Write down the names of the people connected by the event, the type of event, and the date, if you know it. Examples of this would be…
Sarah Montana, Jake Matthews
Married 1964
Emily Matthews
Born to Sarah and Jake Matthews, 17th March, 1972
Step 2:
Now comes the fun part, putting it all together! Some family trees have the oldest family members up top, with younger people branching downward. But you can do it any way you want… it’s your tree, after all.
Then carefully lay out your individual family member cards on a clean surface, like a big table. Move the pieces around to form your family tree. Place any event cards between people. Draw your tree based on the arrangement you’ve laid out. Use extra sheets of paper to extend your tree if you run out of space. You can tape them together to make a super big tree if needed.
Another thing you could do to make your family tree even more interesting to your future generations would be to gather photos of the people in your tree. Ask faraway relatives to lend you photos. You can make copies of the
photos, and tape or glue all those smiling faces onto your tree. Then you could compare which family members look like each other. All in all this can be a lot of fun and what a great way to honor your ancestors.
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It took several hours of research (greatly expedited by the work my family has already done on the family tree), but here’s what I was able to show on my side of things:. Cliff Hansen (me)→Ric Hansen (my father)→Ted [...]
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