Often our first encounter with genealogy is in grade school. Our teacher decides to do a ‘family tree.’ It is often seen as a simple exercise: use some type of chart - a tree, or brackets (like in basketball tournaments), or a classical ancestor chart (like royalty uses in Europe). In many families, children fill in the names of their siblings: (brother[s] and/or sister[s]), and their mother and father. Sometimes grandparents are listed as well, particularly if this ‘family tree’ exercise is done on a day when grandparents are invited to the school to sit in their grandchildren’s classes for a while.

While many elementary school age children do this exercise with no problem, it is not that simple for many other children in today’s world. Often, children today are being raised in a single-parent family because one the parents died early from disease, or from an accident, or violently from a crime, or they are divorced. If both parents have died from an accident, such as an automobile collision, children may be in foster care, sometimes with relatives who have asked to raise the children, or in foster care with foster parents who are unrelated to the children. Sometimes children are put up for adoption, giving rise to birthparents and adoptive parents. Another situation arises when the children’s parents have divorced, and one or both parents have remarried, often bringing into the family new siblings. Another situation arises when the family situation may be a two-parent family where both parents are women, or where both parents are men. Finally, due to infertility of either spouse, having a child may involve a sperm donor and/or a surrogate mother (who may, or may not, be genetically related to the desired child depending on the method of fertilization used).

Because courtship and marriage are filled with strong emotions such as romantic love, often including varying levels of a sexual relationship, and usually an overwhelming desire to have children, families are complicated. Consequently, the questions that form the basis of genealogy: when did you meet, when did you marry, when and how many children did you have, may seem simple, they often bring up all kinds of sensitive situations and stressful emotions for parents and grand-parents.

If you are a school student who is old enough to complete a ‘family tree’ assignment on your own, and you begin by asking your parent[s] the basic set of questions, please be sensitive to your parent[s]’ feelings. If your questions are answered quickly and with detail, that’s great. If there is a hesitation, or an odd look, or you get a ‘bad’ feeling, respect your parent[s]’ desire for privacy. Fill out the information that you can fill out in your chart, and ‘let it go.’ You will have plenty of time and opportunity to ask questions in your adult years, particularly if and when you give birth to your own children. When you do get family information, check out our family charts to see if one of them works for you.

If you are a parent of a school student who is too young to complete a ‘family tree’ assignment on their own, please help them as much as you are comfortably able to. You can download simple or complicated family charts that you might want to use instead of the ‘one size fits all’ chart handed out at school. Choose the chart that best handles your current situation, based on your personal decision about how much disclosure will occur, and go from there.

We sincerely hope these early encounters with genealogy will begin a lifetime interest about ancestors in your family, as it has for us.
General Tips for Intermediate to Advanced Genealogists

A) Libraries across the U.S. typically have a good, basic collection of books dealing with genealogy. Besides the general books on ancestor searching, many libraries have, or can obtain, specialized books to help with searching in: U.S. Death Records, and U.S. Military Records, as well as books on techniques for searching property titles in various states of the U.S., among many other topics.

B) Digital genealogy programs include, but are not limited to:

Ancestry.com - has the most content from the most sources, including international, and the highest monthly fee.

GenealogyBank.com - offers a 30-day free trial, but holds back somewhat on telling you about the actual cost per month after the free trial.

MyHeritage.com - allows you to download Family Tree Builder software for free.

Genealogy.com - has the best price: free.

We could list 20 more programs with ease, but that wouldn’t be of much help. What’s important to know about internet genealogy software is that the biggest and best sites are going to charge higher user fees, because it takes money to create, maintain, and update massive genealogy information databases. But the biggest and best sites are not always the easiest to learn and navigate as the smaller sites. If you are a novice at genealogy software, it might be best to start with a free site. Because if it’s free, it’s not going to be massive. Therefore, it should be much easier to learn how to use.

Once you’ve got some experience with a free genealogy website, then try experimenting with some of the free trials that the mid-sized websites offer. After a free month of experimenting, you will know if it is good for you to stay with the midsize website or to move up to a more difficult to learn research tool and if you are spending enough time searching to justify the cost of doing that.

Finally, if you find that you are spending a few minutes, or more, pretty much every day working at your genealogy research, then you know for sure you are ready to seriously consider moving on up to a massive genealogy website. The cost: Ancestry.com offers a basic U.S. package for approximately $1.00/day, and they offer discount promotions of that package on a fairly regular basis.

C) Possibly the best overall online sites to find links to other online genealogical websites are:
1) Home Advisor’s History at Home: A Guide to Genealogy is a brief, but thorough overview of the genealogical process and around 30 different links to a broad variety of free public-created and government-created genealogy websites [thanks to Courtney Phillips and her crew for this tip].
2) TruePeopleSearch is a smaller website, somehow associated with an internet search engine geared to finding living persons, which decided to publish an overview article of genealogy record types, how to interpret them so you can use them, and within that excellent overview article decided to publish a link to a Family Tree Magazine online article that does an excellent, in-depth analysis of Christian church-related genealogy records [thanks to Donna Grossman for this tip].

D) Finally, please check out ‘specialized free' websites:

The list below was complied by Janice J. Higdon, our former HFA Website webmaster. She was our guest speaker at the 2012 St. Augustine Annual Meeting and gave a presentation on:
Online searching for building a family tree. Free sites for information exist and are available for your use. A few of the websites are:

Cemetery Records Online
National Archives Genealogy
National Archives Veterans Records
Social Security Death Index
FamilySearch Social Security Death Index (you need to be a member to get to this file)
Find A Grave
Cyndi's List
United States Census Genealogy
Library of Congress Genealogy
The USGenWeb Project
Kitchen Works: A unique guide highlighting the connection between food and genealogy by a kitchenware supplier.

The Higdon Family Association, Inc. is not affiliated with any other national genealogy organization, nor do we receive any fees from any commercial company for listing them above.