Their are many free (or close to free) tools out their to help you build your tree. I am going to concentrate on 2. Ancestry.com and MyHeritage Family Tree Builder. Both of these tools have a built in search function that assists you in finding data.
Using Ancestry, follow the steps to create a login and start building your tree. Start with yourself then add everyone and every fact you collected in the last step. Remember to add every little detail. Ancestry uses supplemental data like birth date and city to sort its findings so that more relevant data is on top. For instance a Joe Smith Born in 1880 will be higher than a Joe Smith born in 1910 if you have his birth year marked as 1878.
Ancestry will scan every person in your tree and provide you with Hints if it finds a possible match. I said POSSIBLE. Please be sure to use diligence to ensure that the data it found is a true match. It will also search other family trees for data and these must be used only with a large amount of caution.
The many documents it will find can be a boon to your research. From Census records to Social Security Death index data. Take your time and as you find details about the people (or new relatives) be sure to update (or create) the profile sheets we created in the first step. Dont forget to document your sources.
Next step, errors and transcription.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment