Every family history starts in the same place: with what the living remember. The records come later. Here is the order of operations that professional researchers actually follow — it works just as well at a kitchen table.

Step 1 — Interview your relatives first

This is the most urgent step, because memories are the one source that doesn't keep. Sit down with the oldest members of your family and ask about names (including maiden names and nicknames), places, dates — even rough ones — and the stories. Record the conversation if they'll let you. Ask who is in the old photographs while someone can still say. A detail that seems minor — "the farm was near the church" — can later crack open a record search.

Step 2 — Gather what the house already holds

Before searching anywhere online, collect the home sources: birth, marriage, and death certificates; a family Bible; military papers; naturalization documents; obituaries; letters; the backs of photographs. These give you verified anchor points — and research always works from the known to the unknown.

Step 3 — Work backward, one generation at a time

The cardinal rule. Start with yourself, document your parents, then their parents, and so on. The temptation is to leap toward an interesting name five generations back — but every skipped generation is a chance to attach someone else's family to yours. Genealogy's most common error isn't a missing record; it's a wrong connection made in haste between two people who share a name.

Step 4 — Use the free records

  • FamilySearch — free access to billions of record images, including civil registers and church books worldwide.
  • Federal census records — a snapshot of nearly every American household every ten years, 1790–1950.
  • State vital-records offices and archives — birth, marriage, and death records, many indexed online.
  • Find a Grave — cemetery records with photographs of headstones, often with family links.
  • Local historical societies and libraries — county histories, newspapers, and church registers that never made it online.

Step 5 — Verify everything, and keep uncertainty honest

Two habits separate reliable trees from wishful ones. First: never accept another person's online tree as evidence — use it as a hint, then find the original record yourself. Second: keep dates as uncertain as the record leaves them. If a source says a birth was "circa 1830," write circa 1830 — turning it into an exact year is how errors calcify. Note where every fact came from, even if only in a simple list; future-you will thank present-you.

Where it gets hard

Some walls are real. For Black American families, records before 1870 — the first federal census to list formerly enslaved people by name — require different sources and methods entirely: Freedmen's Bureau files, church records, land and probate documents. Immigrant lines eventually cross into other countries' record systems and languages. Old scripts, burned courthouses, and common surnames all slow things down. None of these walls are necessarily the end — but they are usually where the hobby either becomes a discipline or hands off to one.

When to bring in a professional

If the search has stalled, the records have left your language, or you want the result to be something finished — written, documented, and made to hand down rather than a folder of bookmarks — that's the natural handoff point. It costs nothing to find out what's possible: Sapling begins every project with a free assessment of your family's records, and we'll tell you honestly how far back your lines can be traced before you decide anything.

Sapling.Family is a family-history research service led by Professor Cisco Bradley. See how a project works, explore a complete sample report, or read our guide to hiring a professional genealogist.