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My Suggestions Links to Getting Started
My Suggestions1. Interview close living relatives
2. Track down not so close living relatives
3. Track down obituaries and other newspaper clippings on most recent relative's deaths.
4. Find your way into the first census available: 1920 census and go backwards from there.I cannot emphasize how important it is to start with living people. If you're grandparents have passed on, look for their brothers, or sisters, or their spouses, or their cousins, and so on. I have gotten valuable information from a 70 year old second cousin of my dad, an 80 year old surviving spouse of a second cousin of my grandfather, and so on.
That is the easy part. Now, the hard part. Filling in the blanks and starting to get past the twentieth century into the nineteenth century and earlier will be harder.
Note you are usually trying to get who, what, when, where on each piece of evidence i.e. who died when and where. Who married when and where. Who was born when and where. Then, to start putting those pieces together, like a zigzaw puzzle.
1. Sit down with all close living relatives with a pencil and paper (and consider a tape recorder) and start talking and writing. Maybe use a spiral notebook or a three ring, whatever, but not loose scraps of paper). Find out as much as you can about not so close relatives (your folks' cousins, great aunts and uncles, etc.)
2. Try to find those folks, tell them what you're doing. If it's long distance, it's harder. If they are within a hundred miles or so, visiting them is usually worth a drive. Seniors, particularly, are usually thrilled with the interest and willing to cooperate (there are exceptions.... some people will not respond at all). Find out everything you can, stories, personalities, facts, who, what, when, where, etc. I have gotten valuable information from cousins of my dad, sister of my grandmother, widow of a great uncle, stepson of another great uncle, etc., so don't ignore these folks, even neighbors and friends of your grandfolks may have some little clue that will help you.
3. Try to go to cemeteries if you can and find the family plots and headstones. The plots will give you names of folks in your family you don't know about, and the headstones will give you clues for birthdates and deathdates to search for news clippings, wills, etc.
4. Your local library can obtain the newspaper clippings, if microfilmed, of virtually any newspaper printed in the US, if it is on microfilm, through inter-library loan. You will probably have to find out what library keeps the newspapers in whatever region of the country you are looking for.
If you wish, if your family is of any size at all, you can make it almost a project in itself just keeping track of living descendants of a common grandparent or great-grandparent.
When you have finished the above, you have laid the foundation. One of your first objectives will be to find your nearest ancestors possible in the 1920 census. By that time, you will be off and running. Then, it's off to the nineteenth century and beyond, and the going gets tougher (but you're tough and you'll get goin', right??).
The next place to go after getting all of the above information is your nearest Family History Center of the LDS church.
Here is a link to the LDS Church page on Getting Started.
The Treasure Map Home Page is an excellent place to getting started with your family genealogy.
Here is a link to a collection of web sites for the Beginner (and even for not beginners) from the Cook Library, Chicago. This is a site with frames, scroll down the index frame until you see the link to "Beginners".
How to Get
Started With Your Genealogy Page.
A Primer on Getting Started: FAQ
from alt.genealogy.