Most people start their family tree in the same place: a search box on a genealogy website, a surname typed in hopefully, and three hours later, somebody else's great-grandfather pasted into their tree. I know because untangling exactly this is a fair portion of my professional work.
The frustrating thing is that starting well is easier than starting badly — it just happens in a different order. Here is the method I use professionally, scaled for doing it yourself.
Step 1: Write down what your family already knows
Before any website, any subscription, any archive: paper. Write down every name, date, place and story you can produce from memory — yours and the family's. Grandma's maiden name. Where the war medal came from. The aunt nobody mentions. Half of it will be slightly wrong, and that's fine; family memory is a map, not a survey. It tells you where to dig.
Step 2: Interview the eldest first
This is the step with a deadline nobody likes to think about. Your eldest relatives hold records that exist nowhere else, and every year the archive shrinks. Sit down with tea and a phone recording (ask first), and use open questions: not "when was your mother born?" but "tell me about your mother." The dates you can find later. The stories you can't.
Step 3: Raid the family paperwork
Certificates, photographs with names pencilled on the back, funeral cards, ration books, that biscuit tin. Every document is an anchor — a fact with evidence attached, which is the currency of everything that follows. Photograph everything, even the apparently boring.
Step 4: NOW the records — and start with the censuses
This is where most people begin, and why most trees go wrong: without steps 1–3, you can't tell which of the four John Smiths born in 1872 is yours. Start with the most recent records and work backwards: the 1921 census, the 1939 Register, then census by census into the past. Each one confirms the last. Never jump centuries because a website suggested a match.
Step 5: Buy certificates strategically
Birth, marriage and death certificates (from 1837 in England and Wales) are the strongest evidence there is — but at £12.50 each, buying them all gets expensive. The professional's rule: buy a certificate when it answers a question, not to decorate a fact you already know. A marriage certificate naming both fathers is usually the best value in genealogy.
Step 6: Go beyond the bones
Census and certificates give you the skeleton. The story lives elsewhere: newspaper archives (your ancestors appeared in court pages, sports results and shipping lists more often than you'd think), parish registers before 1837, workhouse records, military files. This is where a tree becomes a history.
Step 7: Record where everything came from
Every fact in your tree should have its source written down. Future you — or the cousin who inherits the research, or the professional you eventually hire to break a brick wall — needs to know why you believed something. A tree without sources has to be redone; I've redone many.
A note on honesty: somewhere between steps 4 and 6, most families hit a wall — an ancestor who refuses to appear, a name too common, a line that emigrated. That's normal and usually solvable, and it's exactly where a Brick Wall Session earns its keep. But the first three steps? Nobody can do those except your family. Start there, start this month.
