How to trace my Roots
How I did it: I started knowing only a little bit about my mother's side of the family and a little bit about my father's side. Of course I knew all my close relatives, but I didn't know the extended family members. I mapped this information together and visited with my grandmother. She pulled a book off the shelf which was a family history with her father (my great grand father). With this book I was able to build out a huge tree, but there is still work to be done on each of the branches, since the book was published in the 1920s it has several generations missing.
I then went to my local library here in Texas, and talked to the librarian. They didn't have access to microfilm, but they did have access to a database with all the census records, that was awsome, and provided me all the little clues I needed to fill in the missing branches.
Once you start you will have tons of notes, so how do you organize them. There are several methods, but my entire goal for this project was to share my findings with my family. I found geni.com, this is a free family site where you can list your entire family tree. I should say this is more of a social family tree. Each person (including the deceased) have a log in. You can post pictures, stories, videos, recordings, anything which would be significant to your family history. Then add the living members, and they do their own research and bulid out a bigger tree, now you have a family forest. And it's crazy but geni tells you the relationship to each of the members of the forest.
I'm putting this project down for a few months, but it's a life long bit of research which might take me years.
Lessons & tips: Resources are abundant:
Don't pay for things you can get for free, go to your local library and see what they can help you with.
Talk to family members, put together an interview and see how much you can get from them. They won't know it all, but they will give you the clues (where they lived, how old they last saw them, etc.)
Use the internet, tons of people share their family tree's and your tree could tied to them.
Resources: Local Library
Family members
geni.com
roots.org
