Ideas and strategies to begin climbing your family tree.
Keep an open mind and be ready for every possibility because ancestors were only human. Their stories are as wide and varied as those of the people living today.
If an online tree or published book seems to include your lineage, make note of it and give the researcher credit for any help their work provides you, but always do your own research.
Getting Started
Climb your family tree one branch at a time.
- Begin with yourself, followed by your parents, then your grandparents, and so on.
- As you write down each family group, include your siblings, your parents' siblings, grandparents' siblings, etc. Try these helpful family group sheets and pedigree charts External to organize the information.
- Ask who has collected or inherited your family's papers and photographs. Arrange a visit!
- Interviews: Interview living relatives, family friends, and others who knew your relatives well.
- Ask for full names, complete dates, and detailed locations for every person and event in your tree.
- Expand on that raw data with the details: Who were they named after? What were their childhoods, schooldays, workdays like? How did couples meet?
- Census Records: Find your family in the 1950 Census External and continue backward decade by decade. Access Census records by creating a free account at FamilySearch: 1790 External, 1800 External, 1810 External, 1820 External, 1830 External, 1840 External, 1850 External, 1860 External, 1870 External, 1880 External, 1890 External, 1900 External, 1910 External, 1920 External, 1930 External, 1940 External, 1950 External.
- Vital Records: Seek out vital and legal records in the county or state where your ancestors lived. These include birth, marriage, divorce, death and more. A quick reference to locate county and state level records is the Red Book: American State, County, and Town Sources, available in the Library or online External.
- Cemeteries and Tombstones: Personally visit the cemetery to read tombstones and see which family members are buried together. While web sites like FindaGrave.com External and BillionGraves.com External post many burials online, these sites are based on volunteer submissions and are not necessarily complete. It is worthwhile to search these sites, but also important to reach out directly to the cemetery for a search of their records.
- Newspapers: Newspaper articles are a great source for family history: obituaries, marriage announcements, biographical articles, social mentions, community news that impacted your family, and more. The Library of Congress provides free access to Chronicling America, a collection of historic newspapers. If the newspapers for your area have not been digitized yet, use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to see which repositories house the archives. You can also access further resources about available publications through the Library's Newspapers and Periodicals Division.
How-Tos and Helpful Tools
Get started at the Library of Congress:
- Find guides that range from tips for beginners to advanced research strategies by browsing these Library of Congress Subject Heading(s):
- Seek out geographic locations and specific research topics in the Library of Congress Research Guides. These will lead you to additional material at the Library and beyond.
- Explore the Library of Congress Local History and Genealogy Section, which holds over 50,000 compiled genealogies and over 100,000 local histories. (See What will I discover in the Library’s local history and genealogy collection? to learn more about what this department has to offer.)
Find more foundational tools and resources online:
- Online guides such as the FamilySearch Wiki External or Rootsweb Wiki External are also great tools for finding records and learning about the particular subjects and places in your research.
- FamilySearch has compiled helpful forms External that you can use to organize your information as you interview relatives, track down vital records, search the Census, and more.
Last Updated: Aug 22, 2024
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