It is a definite plus if you can develop an interest in your Family History at an early age. I know this is often not the case, but believe me, when you get older and some of your Grandparents and parents are no longer with you, you will wish you had talked to them more about their parents and grandparents.

The main things you need to find out are, obviously starting with your parents:

Your Mother’s maiden name and her date of birth.

Also where she was born.

Your Father’s date of birth and place of birth.

If possible, their parents names, dates of birth and place of birth.

I know this sounds pretty basic but I’ll bet there are plenty of people around who never knew their Grandparents Christian names, let alone their Grandmother’s maiden name and where they all came from.

You definitely need to have some idea of the geographic location of their birth and where their birth was registered. This will help you to narrow the search for birth details and to enable you to get copies of birth certificates etc.

Even in the UK you need to be able to pinpoint where your ancestors were born, and with a country as large as the US for example, it is a definite must. Without this information your search is not going anywhere.

You also need to know whether there are any family documents within the family and if so, who has them currently. Perhaps a family bible is in existence.

If the person holding the documents doesn’t want to let them go, just arrange to have photocopies made, that way there won’t be any trouble about you having the information.

I am going to go into the subject of looking after old documents at some later date.

The thing with Family History research is – write every little thing down. No matter what the information, it might not seem important at the time, but most everything becomes important at some time or another. It doesn’t hurt to just jot down notes, better than wishing you had done it when it is too late.

Gathering photographs together is good, try to be sure that names and possibly dates are written on the back so you know who is in the photo and roughly when it was taken.

Any information is good information when it comes to doing your Family History research.

It’s good to know how they earned a living if this is possible.

I will be talking soon about how to use the information you get to take you back another generation.

Have a go, it has to be one of the most interesting and absorbing pastimes ever. It is guaranteed to get you hooked and once started you will never really finish. There is always just one more piece of information for you to get and I think I can speak for all Family Historians, you will never become bored.

Recently I had a disastrous happening – my old laptop where I kept updating my information in my Family Tree Maker programme broke down.

I had a little while previously installed the Family Tree software on my PC and started moving information across. I had to do this manually because I just couldn’t seem to do it any other way.

I am sure there are many of you out there who will be shaking their heads in disbelief that I didn’t know how else to do it. Nevertheless, I did it manually and had managed to get around 1,500 of the 4,000 total on my tree at that date entered into my PC. I am not a complete technophobe but I don’t have too much savvy as to what is possible regarding various family tree programmes.

I couldn’t believe it when my laptop broke down and I couldn’t retrieve the rest of my data. Needless to say I just had to bite the bullet and work at finding the information all over again. From my rough notes I had a fair idea of what was missing and where to look to get it all over again.

I did manage to do this over a period [a long one!] and everything then was going smoothly, however it did make me very aware of how vulnerable all my data was.

I am especially aware now because my tree has grown to 16,700. Unfortunately the Family Tree Maker programme I am running is an older version. I am quite comfortable with using this but it does limit the ways you can backup your family details.

I would like to store the data on USB memory sticks. This seems to me to be a cheap and easy way to store information. These can be bought very cheaply on eBay.

The other reason I would like to put all the info onto memory sticks is because I have family in Australia and others spread around whom I would like to supply with all this information.

I feel that a memory stick would be the easiest way to give all the tree details to different members of my family.

I have therefore come to the conclusion that I shall have to update to the latest Family Tree Maker programme. The other one has given me good service for a good many years but it is time to move forward.

I am well aware that I didn’t even use all the facilities that my older programme offered. I don’t like making things too complicated because I believe that this can lead to problems, but I know that the time has come to upgrade if only for the safety of backed up data.

Last year I mentioned the amazing information you can get if you can tap into an already existing pedigree.

Some months ago I managed to do exactly that. Through one of my Yorkshire CRAVEN ancestors already being peers, subsequently their marriages into other aristocracy led me into the most amazing journey of Royal and aristocratic connections, I still cannot actually believe it.

Naturally, there must be millions of people around who have all these same connections, but the difference is that I now know of these links.

Not that it makes one jot of difference to me in any way, shape or form, except that of interest.

It certainly doesn’t change me or my immediate ancestors but I have to tell you it is a positive hoot to be able to say that you have the likes of Henry VIII, King Charles, All the Henry’s, etc. Even William the Conqueror, Mary Queen of Scots, and so many more of European Royalty, more than you can shake a stick at, on your family tree!!

I do not say any of this to boast, how could I, those who came before owe nothing to me or anything I have done in this life.

Everything boils down to marriages and connections made down through the ages.

What I would like to stress here is that millions of other people are walking around totally unaware of the people who connect with them from the past.

If you don’t do Family History research/genealogical research you are never going to know whether you can hook up to Royalty.

I have every confidence that this could turn out to be the case, but it does need you to make the first step.

You have to put in the work first and keep your fingers crossed that somewhere along the line you can tap into pedigrees already established and this will lead you into that fascinating area of genealogy. It’s quite like a history lesson when you are tracing these ancestors.

Names that you know from your history books leap out at you and if you have been able to add them to your tree, it is so exciting.

One site that I use just about every day is :

ThePeerage.com

This is a fabulous site and citations are shown for every bit of information contained on the site so you can have every confidence in the details.