I’ve only been doing genealogy since September 2010. Eight months may not seem like a long time when you consider how many people out there have been working on their family tree for 20+ years. However, in those 8 little months I’ve accumulated 1,850 people on my family tree. How many of you would want to stop researching and go back through those 1,850 people to add sources to each piece of information?
The following is a list of things I wish I knew from the start. It would have saved me lots of time and aggravation, but at this point I hope it helps someone else out there who’s just starting to work on their own family tree.
- I can’t stress enough to you just HOW important sources are. Once I began my tree, I went back to my parents to ask them about some of the stories I remember hearing over the years. I feverishly took notes on what they told me. I had papers scattered everywhere. On some I wrote whether it was my mom or dad that gave me a certain bit of info. On most I wrote the date down. But when I entered some of the info into my family tree program, I didn’t bother to source it. It’s not a fun task to go back through all of my pages and pages of notes, scattered throughout various file folders – trying to piece everything back together into a valid source citation.