08/12/2017
I originally posted this a few years ago, but it's worth sharing again.
I've had a few people ask me recently about getting started with genealogy. Here are some tips if you're interested, some of the sites I mention are geared towards Newfoundland, but the process is the same no matter where you research. 🙂
-download a good genealogy program to keep all of your info in one place. I like Legacy Family Tree http://www.legacyfamilytree.com/ for ease of use. They provide a good standard program for FREE, or if you want all the additional features (which you really won't need unless you become a hardcore addict lol) you can buy the Deluxe version. Legacy (or any other genealogy program) will save your information as a GEDcom, which is the standard file type created by genealogy programs.
-start with yourself, and work from there with what you do know (parents, siblings, grandparents, etc). Try to source any fact you add, even if it's just to say personal knowledge. One major mistake that newbies make is to be so excited to get started that they don't pay attention to the sources. Keep in mind that a "fact" without a source is mythology.
-the most important facts you'll want for every person are full name, as well as dates and locations of birth, marriage, and death. Also important are religion, occupation, education, military service (ie WWI, WWII, etc), and anything else you can find out. You won't find all of that for every person, but try to get as much as you can.
-don't assume! You should be fairly certain you've found the right person before adding them in, because even in small villages of 500 people, there could be 2 or 3 people with the same name so it's easy to get them confused sometimes! That's where ages, occupations, etc come in handy! For example, John Smith had two sons John and Robert, and they each had sons John and Robert. Suddenly there's 3 John Smiths and 2 Robert Smiths in one very small community!
-I recommend setting up folders on your hard-drive to store copies of any documents you might find. Sometimes you find a digitized document at a pay-only site (such as Ancestry) and unless you save it to your hard-drive, you won't be able to access it again once you stop paying your subscription. Other times, documents will no longer be available online, so you want to make sure you save it once you find it. I have a separate hard-drive for genealogy on my laptop, with folders for Birth and Baptism records, Marriages, Census records, Death Certificates and Obituaries, etc.
-check NL Gen Web, NL Grand Banks, which are both good sites for NL info, except that it's transcriptions of local records, as opposed to copies of originals. But they only search exact spellings of what you type, so for example one branch of my family were Chislett's, and I had to search for Chislett, Chislet, and I even found them under Chrislett once when I had a (fortunate) typo! Searching the records at Family Search is also free, and they often include digitized copies of records for NL and elsewhere, so it has become my favourite go-to site for NL research.
-also check out MUN's Digital Archive Initiative for free info, such as old maps and local histories, etc
-and last but not least: don't take other researcher's info without verifying it all first and asking permission! You can find websites where people can share their GEDcoms. Do not download their trees and combine it with yours no matter how tempting it is! BELIEVE me it's more trouble than it's worth! I did that early on, only to discover numerous mistakes that it took me months to sort out. 😞 If you find someone else's research on your family, your best bet is to bookmark the page, and try to find a documented source for each specific fact they have. So if they say John Smith was born in 1847 in Twillingate, you'll want to check Twillingate and area records on the sites I mentioned above to see if you can find a record of his baptism. Note that baptisms could be years after a birth though, if there was no local minister! Sometimes all the children of a family would be baptised the same day, when a travelling priest/minister came to town every few years.
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