How to make family tree?

Question

Which is the best way to start making it? Where can i get some infos about my ancestors (church?)? Is there some free good program for makin it,i only found some demo and basic tools programs.

Hel wanted

Answer 1

I recommend www.geni.com

you can enter family members as well as invite them to participate as well and everyone can use their knowledge to put the pieces together. You can also use it as a tool to get connected to family members, post pictures and get updated.

Have fun!

Answer 2

tribalpages.com

Legacyfamilytree.com

(Standard Edition is FREE)

Try your local Public Library Ancestry.com is probably FREE there to do lookups.

Remember everything on the internet is not always correct.

Stuff is sometimes just as good as the research who provided it and alot of it is WRONG. So verify, verify verify.

and LIST ALL YOUR SOURCES or you'll regret it later.

Answer 3

Family trees are graphical maps for tracing one's genealogy. It's a graphic layout of boxes and lines linking family members together or a tree with various names and birth dates making up the branches. Family tree can be in a form of:

Pedigree Chart

Photo Montage

Scrapbook

Painting

Genogram

Ahnentafel chart

Online creation of family tree

The online creation of family trees has become increasingly popular.

GEDCOM(Genealogy Data Communication) enables you to take your family tree and convert it to text format, thus enabling you to share your family tree information with other genealogists and upload any GEDCOM family tree to the family tree software of your choice. For details you can browse:

www.tribaljunction.com/creating-family...

Answer 4

Start with yourself and work back, documenting everything as you go.  

First thing, get as much info from living family as possible, particularly your senior 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 story telling might turn out to be very significant.  

Find out if any family has any old family bibles.  Ask to see and make copies of birth, marriage and death certificates.  Also depending on the religious faith, baptismal, first communion, confirmation and marriage certificates can contain vital information.

People involved in genealogy research do not post information about living people in any public forums like the internet as it can be an invasion of privacy and can lead to identity theft.

Go to your public library and find out what all they have in the genealogy section.  They might have a subscription to Ancestry.Com which has lots of records and seems to be getting more all the time. They have all the U.S. censuses through 1930. The 1940 and later are not available to the public yet.  They have U.K. censuses also.

Just don't take as absolute fact everything you see in their family trees or family trees on ANY website, free or paid.  The information is user submitted and mostly not documented or poorly documented.  You might see different information from different subscribers on the same people, then you will see  repeatedly the same info from the different subscribers on the same people. That is no guarantee at all it is correct. A lot of people copy without verifying.  Use the information as CLUES as to where to get the documemtation.  

A Family History Center at a Latter Day Saints(Mormon) Church has records on people all over the world, not just Mormons.

You need to call or vist their free website, FamilySearch.org  and find out their hours for the general public.  In Salt Lake City, they have the world's largest genealogical collection.  Their Family History Centers can order microfilm for you to view at a nominal fee.

I have never had them to try and convert me or send their missionaries by to ring my doorbell.  I haven't heard of them doing that to anyones else that has used their resources.  They are just very nice and helpful.

You will need to order vital records.  In the U.S., each state has its own laws about who, when and where a person can obtain vital records on another.  States are clamping down on birth certificates due to the risk of idenitity theft.  In Texas, if you were not immediate family,it use to be 50 years after someone was born before you could get a birth certificate on another.  Now it is 75 years.  

Also each state started getting vital info at different times.  Many did not start recording birth and death records until the first part of the 20th century.  Once they started a lot of people who were born at home or died at home did not get recorded.

Courthouse records like wills, deeds etc can be very valuable.  

You mention church and yes, church records, depending on the faith, are very important sources before the states began recording birth and death records.  

Cyndi'slist.com has a multitude of websites that can be helpful in obtaining information.

Answer 5

Just google the word geneology.... or go to geneology.com!

Answer 6

http://www.familysearch.org/

Home page for the LDS church site.. their program Personal ancestral file is free, not a demo, has been around for ever. Great to start with.. if you think you want better later, you can transfer the info.

I have used this for over 20 yrs.  Remember this.. bells and whistles are not what matters.. what is important is the quality of the factual info that you put in there. Don't get misled by size either.. 10 persons who are correct, mean more than 1000 names that you have not confirmed.

Programs will not "make" your tree. What makes your tree is researching, finding documents that are accurate. It will NOT necessarily be online.. it won't necessarily be in someone else's ready made tree.  It won't all be free. You will be amazed how many people expect just those things,  and ignore their history because it isn't online.

http://rwguide.rootsweb.ancestry.com/

Here is one (of many) guide to the process. When you pull out your birth certificate to verify your parents and facts.. you have started. Yes.. you already know these facts. Or do you? You MUST start with the idea that whatever you find, has to be based on a record. I'll give you two weeks before you find that "something" that your family tells you, conflicts with records. Once you get past what family can tell you.. then you will be looking for records, anyway. Family knowledge (mom remembers her grandparents) is just a preliminary survey, to be documented and built on.

My final web site to offer is..

http://www.cyndislist.com/

The reason I like cyndislist is because she collects websites, and the more you have, the better your odds. Your ancestors can be anywhere, not just in genealogy sites. I personally have no patience for upstart websites that compete by claiming how many people have 'uploaded' their research for you to share. Many won't bother telling you that uploaded files of someone else's research CAN be in error, nor do they teach you how to find the right info, when someone else hasn't already done it.

The challenge of research is figuring out WHERE your ancestor's records are. Vital statistics are relatively new.. the census is a basic, but you still want to know what to use, before there was a census.. so on.  Your ancestors are different from mine, the uniqueness is what makes it fun. Your grandfather might have a birth certificate in Texas in 1920.. mine was born in Poland in the 1830s.

Also.. hang out here. Post a direct question on who and what you can't find. Many persons here will know how to find that explicit item.. and you learn as you go.

Answer 7

One of the best ways, is to start with your living relatives.  Many of them know or will have recorded family birthdates, marriages, etc.  Good luck.

Answer 8

Oh, yes!  I want it, and I want it now, and it must be free.  Does that about sum it up? (I hope so, because that is what I always want...)

You should start by asking all your living relatives about family history.  Then, armed with that information, you can go to your public library and check to see if it has a genealogy department.  Most do nowadays; also, don't forget to check at community colleges, universities, etc.  Our public library has both www.ancestry.com and www.heritagequest.com free for anyone to use (no library card required).

Another place to check out is any of the Mormon's Family History Centers.  They allow people to search for their family history (and, NO, they don't try to convert you).

A third option is one of the following websites:

http://www.searchforancestors.com/...

http://www.censusrecords.net/?o_xid=2739...

http://www.usgenweb.com/

http://www.census.gov/

http://www.rootsweb.com/

http://www.ukgenweb.com/

http://www.archives.gov/

http://www.familysearch.org/

http://www.accessgenealogy.com/...

http://www.cyndislist.com/

http://www.geni.com/

Cyndi's has the most links to genealogy websites, whether ship's passenger lists, ancestors from Africa, ancestors from the Philippines, where ever and whatever.

Of course, you may be successful by googling: "john doe, born 1620, plimouth, massachusetts" as an example.

Check out this article on five great free genealogy websites:

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article...

IF you are serious about genealogy and IF you find many ancestors, you will soon outgrow ANY genealogy program out there, unless you upload everything to the web.

What I did is to make my own format in word processing documents.  When my tree gets to about 300 pages or so, I start a new one.  Those programs not only eat up a lot of space on the hard drive, but they also require a lot of RAM if you should choose to try to print out the entire tree, which would crash most computers. On the other hand, a 300-page word document is nothing to the computer.

Good luck and have fun!