Sep 10
17
Family Trees Grow Upside Down
If you look at an oak tree, it’s obvious that the oldest part of the tree is at the bottom, and the newest is the smallest branches at the top. In fact, maples, sycamores and every other kind of tree grows that way—except one. Your family tree grows in the exact opposite direction, from the top to the bottom.
This means that the newest family members are closest to the bottom of the tree. That’s where all genealogy research begins—at the bottom. That’s you. Start writing down everything you know about yourself. Start with your full name. Then include all your siblings and offspring, until you’ve covered the immediate family.
Now, it’s time to go back in time, which you do by climbing the family tree. Get together the information about your parents. Next, start looking at cousins, aunts, and uncles, followed by grandparents.
How do you do all this? Keep it simple at first. Look at all your old family pictures, Bibles, and any kinds of documents you may have in your possession. Talk to older relatives. Encourage them to tell you stories about your family’s past. Make a list of questions you would like to ask them, and write down or record their answers. Ask them if they have any pictures or documents you can borrow to copy and return to them.
This is probably the most valuable part of tracing your ancestry, because you are actually touching the original photos and documents, and listening to the stories directly from your own family members’ lips. After that, family research becomes less personal, as you begin to seek out third-party documents where traces of your ancestors and ancestresses are recorded.
However, this aspect of your research is certainly no less fascinating. The primary reason for this is that, as you begin to explore publicly-documented information, you are also moving further into the past, where you start uncovering information about people whose lives, and even their names, were unknown to you. It’s like reading a reverse mystery, one that that you keep reading to find out the things that led up to who you are.
Ancestor hunting is everywhere. People who had never given a thought to what kind of people they descended from, are now becoming fanatically curious. And it’s not just those who hope to find they are heirs to royalty and entitled to a title or a family crest. It goes further than just seeing if they are related in some way to a celebrity.
For people who are new at this and don’t know how to start, the Internet is an obvious place to start looking for how-to family tree researching advice. The good news is, there’s plenty of information, but that’s also the bad news. There is just too much information out there, leading to mind-boggling confusion. Dealing with information overload is sometimes more frustrating than dealing with too-little information.
Even worse, trying to trace your ancestry this way is like climbing a tree by starting at the top. You are looking first for information about historical family members from the past, instead of starting with the present. If you think about it, your best do-it-yourself genealogy guide is right at your fingertips. It’s in your memories, your family heirlooms, documents, and pictures; your older relatives’ recollections and stories they can tell you about your ancestors.
A family tree is just like any other tree. You have to start at the bottom and climb to the top.
