Taking your first steps up the family tree

So now it’s time to answer the burning question: How does one begin to research their family history?

It’s generally accepted that you begin with the person in your family with whom you are the most intimately familiar.


Sure, maybe you have your great-great grandmother’s family bible, passed down to her from a relative who fought at Bunker Hill.

Fuhgeddaboudit. Start with yourself.  Think of it as being your own guinea pig. You are going to practice on yourself. It might not be the best way to practice surgery, but it is the best way to begin genealogy.

Start by sitting down at a computer or with a fresh piece of paper and pen. Now write your autobiography.

It doesn’t have to pages and pages of detailed information, just the broad strokes. Write about the major events in your life. Birth information, schooling, rites of religious passage (such as Communion, Confirmation or Bar Mitzvah), wedding info, jobs, etc. Think of this little writing exercise as the training wheels on your first bicycle, or the water wings you wore before learning how to swim.

Now try and think of a document generated by any of those events: birth certificate, report cards, diploma, pay stubs, wedding license. If you have some of these documents, gather them all up and place them in a folder with your name on it.

What we have here, then, is a good start. And a lesson. What you’ve just done for yourself, you’re going to do for every person you research from then on. Your two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, 16 great-great-grandparents and who knows from there?

Many of the documents you encounter are going to lead you to other documents. Right now I’m looking at a copy of my New Jersey birth certificate. Besides listing my information (name, date and time of birth, weight), this document also names my father, mother – with maiden name – their birthplaces, ages and their home address. It even includes my father’s occupation.

Knowing their ages and birthplaces, I now have enough information to request their birth certificates which will contain similar (but maybe not exactly the same) information about my grandparents.

My parents’ address is another important clue. Armed with this information, I can go to the Hudson County Register’s office and find out if they owned the house we lived in at the time. Maybe it was owned by a relative, which in turn will provide clues to other family members. We’ll go deeper into property records in the future.

Of course, you can just ask your parents about all this information. But as we’ll see in my next column, it’s important to have written documentation about your ancestors.