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Guide · Family History: First Steps

Your family's history starts in the living room, not in a database.

People imagine genealogy as a subscription website and a thousand hours. In truth, the richest records your family owns are a phone call away — living memories and a house full of paper. Do those two things first and the databases become a hundred times more useful when you reach them.

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Step one: the living archive

Every elder is a library no institution holds. Before any website, sit with the oldest members of the family and gather the raw map: full names (and maiden names, and nicknames — write down all three), places lived, who married whom, who moved where and why. Ask especially for the names of their grandparents, which in one conversation can carry you back to the 1800s. The Archive's interview guide holds the method and the questions — movements II and III are built for exactly this.

Step two: empty the drawers

The house is the second archive. Family Bibles with births written inside the cover. Obituaries and funeral programs — which in many families, especially Black families, are miniature biographies naming three generations. Letters, military papers, insurance policies, church anniversaries, marriage certificates, report cards. Photograph everything (the photo guide shows how), and note where each item came from and whose hands it passed through.

Step three: build back one generation at a time

The cardinal rule of research: never leap. Start with yourself, document your parents, then their parents, verifying each link before reaching for the next. The temptation is to chase a famous surname or a family legend five generations up — resist it. A tree built one proven generation at a time stands; a tree built on a legend falls at the first record that contradicts it. Keep the legends, though, and write them down as told — family stories are often distorted truth, and "we came up from Carolina after the flood" usually holds a river, a county, and a date inside it.

Step four: the free records

• FamilySearch.org is completely free and holds billions of records — census pages, birth and death indexes, church books. Its library is the equal of the paid sites for beginning work.
• The U.S. federal census is released 72 years after it is taken — everything through 1950 is public. Census pages every ten years let you watch a family move, grow, and change work across a lifetime.
• County records — deeds, wills, marriage books — sit in courthouses and state archives, increasingly digitized and free.
• Libraries count. Many public libraries offer the paid genealogy sites free from inside the building, and local librarians know the county's records better than any website.

For African-American family lines

Research along Black American lines carries a particular shape, and knowing it beforehand saves months. The 1870 census is the first federal record naming most formerly enslaved people in full — reaching it, then crossing it, is the central milestone. Before 1870, the trail runs through the Freedmen's Bureau records (labor contracts, marriage registers, bank applications — free on FamilySearch and rich with family detail), church minutes, and county property records. This wall is real, but it is being breached every year as more records come online — and it is one more reason the oral record you gather in step one is precious beyond measure: a great-grandmother's remembered county and remembered names are often the exact key the written record needs.

Step five: write it down as you go

A fact without its source becomes a rumor in one generation. For every discovery, note where it came from — "1930 census, Baltimore, sheet 14" or "Aunt Dorothy, by phone, July 2026" — and keep one running document of what you know and how you know it. Your descendants will not have to redo your work; they will stand on it.