Genealogy for Beginners: Start With What You Already Have

Genealogy has a branding problem. Search for how to start and you will find subscription platforms, parish records written in nineteenth-century handwriting, and DNA kits on sale, as if the entry fee to your own family history were a credit card.

The sequencing is backwards. Professional genealogists spend most of their time on paperwork precisely because the free material at home has already been exhausted, and the paid archives only pay off once you know exactly which person you are looking for. Begin the other way around and a hundred dollars of subscriptions buys you little. Begin at home and those same archives become sharp instruments later.

Here is what starting at home actually looks like, in the order that works.

1. Interview your oldest relatives first, because they have a deadline

Every professional gives this advice first, and it is the only piece of beginner advice with a genuine expiry date. Census records, passenger lists, and church registers will still be there in five years. Your great-aunt's memory of who her grandmother was will not necessarily be.

Ask embarrassingly simple questions, the ones that feel too basic to bother with. Full names, including middle names and the maiden names of every woman in the line. Where each person was born, and where they died. Who their siblings married, and what happened to those marriages. What work people did. Roughly when the family moved, and from where to where. These questions feel beneath you, which is exactly why nobody has written the answers down anywhere.

Then push one level deeper with the questions that open records up later:

• A woman's maiden name, which is the single most valuable fact in family research and the hardest to find in archives
• Religious affiliation, because it tells you which parish or congregation kept the records you will eventually need
• Dates as approximations. "Before the war" or "when they still lived in Brest" is usable

Record the conversation on your phone with permission. A voice memo of a relative telling stories is the artifact people end up valuing most, more than any document you will find later.

One practical method beats every questionnaire: interview over photographs. Put a family tree with pictures up on a shared screen and simply ask "who is this?" The photo prompts memories that a blank sheet of questions does not, and wrong guesses pull out corrections that contain new information. Type each answer in while the relative is still on the line, in whatever tool you are keeping the tree in. A name you intend to write up later is a name you will lose.

2. Raid the house before you search any archive

Most families are sitting on primary sources without knowing it, and they are almost always better than the transcriptions you will find online. Funeral programs and obituaries are the densest paper in any house: a single folded program routinely lists full names, birth and death dates, surviving relatives, burial place, and the church the family attended. My own breakthrough came from one, a funeral program from 1997 that carried my great-grandmother's maiden name in the list of survivors. I had failed to find that name in two evenings of archive searching because I did not know enough about her to recognize her.

Look for these, and photograph rather than borrow:

• Birth, marriage, and death certificates, usually in the back of a document drawer or an old suitcase
• The family Bible, if there is one, including flyleaf inscriptions
• Letters and envelopes, since postmarks are dated records of where someone lived
• Military discharge papers, union cards, school reports, and naturalization papers
• Baptism and confirmation cards, which often name godparents who turn out to be relatives

Why bother photographing when you could scan properly later? Because capture is the irreversible step and quality is not. A phone photo of a 1948 railway ticket taken today preserves a document that a burst pipe could destroy next month. Our guide to scanning old family photos covers the technical side if the pile is mostly prints.

One historical note that explains why household paper matters so much: a large portion of the 1890 United States federal census burned in a 1921 fire at the Commerce Department, so for that decade family-held records are often the only surviving evidence of who lived in a household. European research has similar holes where parish registers were lost in the wars. The gaps in the archives are exactly where the shoebox in the closet becomes irreplaceable.

3. Write down where each fact came from

This is the habit that separates a tree that grows from one that collapses. For every name and date you record, note in one line where you learned it: "told by Grandma Marie, June 2026," "funeral program, Henri Delacroix, 1997," "birth certificate photocopy, in mom's possession." Twenty words of citation, and in three years you will still know which facts are solid and which are family lore that needs checking.

It also protects you from the most common beginner failure, which is building two generations on a single mistaken identification and not noticing for a year. When every claim has a source, a correction in one place tells you exactly which conclusions need rebuilding.

4. Build a small tree you can actually see

Once you have a dozen names and a handful of photos, put them into visible structure. A chart does two things a notes app cannot. It exposes gaps: which grandmother has no mother attached, which sibling has no spouse. And it exposes contradictions: two brothers born two years apart in different countries is a fact that hides in a list of names and shouts from a family tree.

Keep the first tree small and finish it. Grandparents, parents, you, siblings, first cousins: twenty people is a complete project, and a finished small tree teaches you more about how records connect than a sprawling half-finished one with four hundred unsourced entries. Adding photos matters more than it sounds, because faces are how relatives recognize the people they half-remember, and recognition is what gets you invited to the next correction. Our guide to making a family tree with photos walks through that part, and organizing old family photos covers what to do when the prints outnumber the names you know.

When to graduate to the big platforms

After a few months you will hit the wall every beginner hits: the family's attics and memories are exhausted, and the remaining ancestors were dead before anyone you can call was born. That is the moment for FamilySearch, which is free with an account and holds billions of indexed records, and only after that for paid platforms like Ancestry or Findmypast.

By then you will arrive knowing surnames, maiden names, villages, and rough dates, which is what those platforms' search engines need to return anything useful. Beginners who skip straight to the archives spend their subscriptions paging through results for a name that matches forty people in the wrong country.

DNA testing deserves the same caution. It answers specific questions, usually about a branch where the paper trail stops, and it comes with privacy tradeoffs and the possibility of findings your family did not expect. If you test anyone, test the oldest generation first, because their DNA carries information that disappears with them.

Where a photo-first tree tool fits

Interviews and shoeboxes get you the material. A photo-first tree tool is where it becomes something a relative can look at and correct. Photo Family Tree runs in the browser: upload the photos, click a face to record who it is, and the relationships assemble around them. Nothing uploads to a server, which matters when the photos are of people who never consented to being in anyone's cloud, and the export is one high-resolution PNG you can send to the relative who just corrected you. For the first twenty-person tree described above, the browser editor is enough and costs nothing.

Start with what has the shortest shelf life

The archives are patient. The people and the paper in your house are not. An afternoon of phone calls, a drawer of certificates photographed with your phone, and a twenty-person tree will get you further than any subscription, and it costs nothing but the time you would otherwise spend comparing pricing pages.