Starting a family tree sounds simple — until you sit down to do it and realize you're not quite sure who your great-grandmother's parents were, let alone how to find out. The good news: every family tree starts the same way, with the same first steps, and those steps are more accessible today than at any other point in history.
This guide walks you through exactly how to start — from what to gather before you open a single database, to where to find records online once your foundation is in place.
Step 1: Gather What You Already Know
Before you search anything, write down what you already know about yourself and your immediate family. Full names, birth dates and places, parents' names, where you grew up. Don't skip this step because it seems obvious — it's the foundation everything else rests on.
Genealogy works backward from the known to the unknown. If you start searching databases without a clear starting point, you'll find records that might belong to your family — but you'll have no way to verify them. The more specific your starting point, the more confident you can be in every discovery that follows.
The five pieces of information that matter for every ancestor are: full name, birth date, birth place, marriage date and place, and death date and place. In genealogy, these are called the core research standards — and they're the filter that keeps your searches on track.
In Lesson 1: The Big Five Standards, we walk through exactly what to record for every ancestor, why those five facts matter more than any other, and how to use them to evaluate every record you find.
Step 2: Interview Living Relatives — Before It's Too Late
Your oldest living relatives are irreplaceable. They carry memories, stories, and documents that exist nowhere in any database. When they're gone, that information is gone too — no census record, no immigration form, no archive will have it.
Call your grandparents. Ask your parents. Visit older aunts and uncles. Ask about names, dates, places, and stories. What do they remember about their parents? Where did the family come from? Were any names changed at immigration? Are there old documents, photographs, or letters in the house?
Write everything down. Photograph any documents you find. Record conversations if permission is given. Even a single conversation can unlock a generation of research that might otherwise take years to piece together from records alone.
Step 3: Search Your Own Home First
Before you go online, go through your own home. Attic boxes, filing cabinets, old photo albums, the back of dresser drawers, family bibles. You're looking for birth certificates, baptism records, marriage licenses, military discharge papers, immigration documents, old letters, and photographs.
These are primary sources — original documents created at the time of the event. They're the most reliable evidence in genealogy, and some may exist in no other form in the world. A single box in your attic could contain decades of verified family history waiting to be found.
Photograph or scan everything. Label each file with the person's name and the approximate date. You've just created an archive.
Step 4: Set Up Your Organization System
You're about to start collecting a lot of information. The difference between research that compounds over years and research that devolves into a confusing pile of unsourced facts is organization — and it's much easier to build that habit before you start than to retrofit it later.
For every fact you add to your family tree, record where it came from: the database, the collection, the year, the page. For every source you find, note what it says and what questions it raises. For every search you conduct, track what you tried so you don't repeat it six months from now.
Lesson 3: Getting Organized covers the filing systems and source citation standards that serious genealogists use — both digital and paper, from day one.
Step 5: Download a Family Tree Chart
A family tree chart is one of the most useful tools a beginner can have. It maps your family visually — grandparents, great-grandparents, and beyond — in a format that makes the gaps obvious. Every empty box is a research target. Every filled box tells you how close you are to the next generation.
Our free Six-Generation Family Tree is a printable chart that maps six complete generations in one place. Fill in what you already know — you might be surprised how far back you can go just from memory and family documents.
Download the Free Six-Generation Family Tree →
Step 6: Start Searching Records Online
With your foundation in place, you're ready to search. Two databases cover the vast majority of American genealogical records:
FamilySearch (completely free) is run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and holds billions of records — census data, vital records, immigration documents, military records, and more. It also maintains a collaborative global family tree with hundreds of millions of documented entries. For most beginners, FamilySearch is where the real research begins.
Ancestry (subscription, free trial available) has the most comprehensive private census indexing and a massive collection of digitized records. Many public libraries provide free on-site access — check your local library before paying for a subscription.
Start by searching for yourself, then your parents, then your grandparents. Work backward, one generation at a time. The goal at this stage isn't to find as many records as possible — it's to find verified records for each ancestor before moving to the next generation.
Step 7: Follow the Tree Backward — One Generation at a Time
The most important rule in genealogy is the one most beginners break: work backward from the known to the unknown, one generation at a time. Don't try to jump from yourself to your great-great-grandparents in one search. Trace each generation completely before moving to the next.
Why this matters: every generation you move backward, the records get harder to find and the names get easier to confuse. Researchers who skip generations routinely attach themselves to entirely wrong families — and spend months untangling the mess. A methodical approach takes longer up front but saves enormous time over the course of real research.
The research plan that works: for each ancestor, gather the Big Five facts from census records, vital records, and family documents. When all five are verified, move to the previous generation. Keep a research log that tracks what you've tried and what's still missing.
What Comes Next: The Records Wall
At some point — usually within your first few months of serious research — you'll hit the records wall: the generation where living memory ends and the documentation runs out. Names you can't find. Whole branches that seem to disappear. This is normal. It's not failure. It's where the real work of genealogy begins.
The skills that carry you through the records wall are the ones the course teaches: understanding what records exist for each time period and geography, knowing how to find records that aren't indexed online, and learning to read the documents you find with the same precision they were originally recorded.
Your six-generation family tree chart is the map. The blank boxes tell you where to look next.