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Starting your family history research can feel like standing at the edge of an ocean. You know there are ancestors out there — but where do you even begin?
The good news: you already know more than you think. The challenge isn't finding information — it's knowing what information matters, what to do with it, and how to avoid the mistakes that send beginners down dead ends for months.
This guide covers the five things every genealogy beginner needs to understand before opening a single database.
What You Already Know Is Your Foundation
Every family tree in existence starts in the same place: with the person at the keyboard. Most beginners skip over this step — they open Ancestry or FamilySearch and start searching for great-grandparents before they've documented what they already know.
The problem: genealogy works backward from the known to the unknown. If you don't have a clear starting point, you have no way to verify whether the records you find actually belong to your family.
The five types of information that matter for every ancestor are: full name, birth date, birth place, marriage date and place, and death date and place. In our course, we call these the Big Five Standards — and they're the foundation of every search. Without them, you're guessing.
In Lesson 1: The Big Five Standards, we walk you through exactly what to record, why each one matters, and how to spot gaps in your research.
Why Your Living Relatives Are Irreplaceable Sources
Before you search any database, talk to your living relatives. Call your grandparents. Ask your parents. Visit your oldest aunts and uncles.
They hold memories, documents, and stories that exist nowhere else in the world. Census records will tell you where someone was born. A living grandmother can tell you why a family left that place, what the neighborhood was like, and what the family name sounded like when spoken — information that can unlock records you'd never find by name alone.
Documents are even more valuable. Birth certificates, immigration papers, old letters, and military discharge records are primary sources — the raw material of genealogical research. Photograph everything you find. A photo of an original document is worth more than ten database hints.
Our course covers how to conduct effective relative interviews and build a family document archive from scratch.
The Importance of Source Citations — From Day One
Here's the mistake most beginners make: they find a record, add the information to their tree, and move on. No note of where they found it. No record of what the document actually said.
Six months later, they want to verify the information. They can't find the record again. They don't know if it was on FamilySearch or Ancestry, what year, what collection. The information is in their tree with no path back to the source.
This habit — recording where every fact comes from — is what separates reliable research from guesswork. In genealogy, a name in a tree isn't evidence. A name backed by a source is evidence.
Lesson 3: Getting Organized covers the citation standards that professional genealogists use and the filing systems that keep research clean and findable.
Why Working Backward Is the Only Method That Works
Genealogy runs in one direction: from the known to the unknown, from yourself backward in time. You start with documented facts about yourself, document your parents, then your grandparents, then your great-grandparents — one generation at a time.
The reason this matters: every generation you move backward, the records get harder to find. Living relatives become unavailable. Documents get lost. Names get misspelled. By starting at the present and moving backward methodically, you build a verified foundation that each new generation can be checked against.
Starting with old ancestors and trying to work forward is how people attach themselves to the wrong family — and spend months untangling the mess.
The full methodology — how to choose the right records at each generation, how to evaluate conflicting information, and how to know when you're ready to move backward — is covered in Lesson 2: First Steps.
The Two Databases Worth Knowing
There are dozens of genealogy databases. Two matter most for beginners:
FamilySearch is completely free and run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It holds billions of records — census data, vital records, immigration documents, military records, and more — and its family tree includes hundreds of millions of documented entries.
Ancestry has the largest private record collection and the most comprehensive census indexing. It's subscription-based, but a free trial is available. Many researchers use both, starting with FamilySearch (free) and moving to Ancestry when they need deeper access.
Our course walks you through using both databases effectively — what to search first, how to evaluate results, and when to use which.
The Records Wall and What Comes After It
At some point in your research — probably sooner than you expect — you'll hit the records wall: the point where living memory ends and documents begin. Names you can't find. Places you can't locate. Whole generations that seem to disappear.
This is normal. It's not failure. It's where the real work of genealogy begins.
The records you need exist somewhere — maybe not online yet, maybe not digitized, maybe in a county courthouse archive or a church records collection. The difference between a beginner who stays stuck and an effective researcher is knowing how to find where to look next.
That's the skill the course teaches: not just how to search, but how to analyze what you've found, identify what's missing, and design a research plan to find it.
Start free. No commitment. Your ancestors have been waiting.