Читать книгу Who Do You Think You Are? Encyclopedia of Genealogy: The definitive reference guide to tracing your family history - Nick Barratt - Страница 12

The first practical step you’ll need to take is to gather as much information as you can about your family, from your family; and where better place to begin than with yourself? After all, it’s your journey. Write down everything you know about your immediate family, from your date of birth to your parents’ names, dates of birth and marriage, and see how far back you can go from there. Can you name all of your grandparents? Do you know their dates of birth, marriage and death if applicable? What about your eight great-grandparents? Can you name them, and provide similar details? It’s not as easy as it seems, and many people simply can’t give all of this data from memory. Nevertheless, even if you have doubts about what you think you know, it’s important to write down as much as you can remember about everyone at this stage.

Apart from this important biographical data which, as you’ll see in Section Two, you will eventually use to start tracking down original documents, you also need to focus on other aspects of their lives. In particular, you need to focus on where they were born, married, lived and died, as geography plays an important part in the detective process. Indeed, make a note of any scrap of information that you can find out about them, such as what jobs they did, whether they moved around and when they lived in certain places. It helps to write down the names and age differences of any siblings you know of as well, as these may enable you to narrow down a search in the archives later on.

Are there any family stories that were passed down to you that you want to find out more about? These will provide the colour in your family tree, and even trivial details can prove to be important in the next phase of your research, when you ask members of your family to comment on your memories. Did Uncle Albert serve with the Merchant Navy? What about great-grandpa, whose tales of valour in the Great War were retold regularly at Christmas? Memories of growing up in a foreign land, such as colonial India, can help you locate missing branches of your family when the time comes to search official records. Write down what you can remember about these snippets of information, and who told them to you. Research into these stories and family myths can run in parallel with your work constructing your family tree. You may find that as you build the basic tree the truth about some of these stories emerges, or it may become clear that more complicated research will be required to piece the jigsaw together, in which case Section Three of this book will be able to aid you.