How to Start Your Family Tree: A Step-by-Step Beginner's Guide

You don't need a genealogy degree or an expensive subscription to start a family tree. Most of what you need is sitting in your own memory, your phone's contacts, and one or two relatives who are willing to talk for an hour. Here's exactly what to do.

Start with what you already know

Before you Google a single ancestor, write down what's already in your head. Get a piece of paper or open a fresh note — your name, your parents' names, your siblings, your grandparents (full names if you know them, including maiden names), aunts, uncles, first cousins. Add birthdays, locations, anything that comes to mind.

You'll be surprised how much you actually know once you start writing. You'll also be surprised by the gaps — and those gaps are your roadmap. They tell you who to call.

Talk to your oldest living relative — soon

This is the single most important step, and the one most people put off until it's too late. Your oldest living relative knows things nobody else does: the names of great-grandparents, the towns people came from, who married whom and when, the cousin who moved to California in 1962. None of it is written down anywhere except their head.

Don't wait for the "right time." Call them this week. Bring a notebook or record the conversation (with permission). Ask open questions — "tell me about your mother's family" gets you more than "what was your grandmother's name?" Use our 25 questions to ask your relatives as a prompt sheet.

Verify with documents — but don't get stuck here

Once you have a draft tree from memory and interviews, you can start cross-checking with records. Birth certificates, marriage licenses, census records, ship manifests, military records, obituaries — they're all public for anyone over a certain age.

The trap here is perfection. You'll find conflicting information (people lied about their age on the census, names were anglicized at Ellis Island, dates were misremembered). Record what you find, note your sources, and move on. A family tree with question marks is more useful than a family tree that doesn't exist because you got stuck on one ancestor.

Our guide to free genealogy resources covers where to look without paying.

Pick a place to keep it

You can keep a family tree on paper, in a spreadsheet, in dedicated software, or online. Each has trade-offs:

• Paper — fine for sketching, but it's a single point of failure. Spilled coffee, basement flood, lost binder, and decades of work are gone.
• Spreadsheet — better than paper, but it's flat. You can list 200 people but you can't see how they connect.
• Dedicated genealogy software — powerful but lives on one computer. When that computer dies, so does the tree (unless you're disciplined about backups, which most people aren't).
• Online — accessible from anywhere, automatically backed up, and (this is the big one) other relatives can contribute. More on why online matters.

Invite your family to help

The hardest part of building a family tree alone is that you only know what you know. Your aunt knows different things. Your second cousin knows different things. Your grandmother knows different things. If they can all add what they know to the same tree, it grows ten times faster and is ten times more accurate.

This is genuinely the unlock. A family tree that one person maintains is a hobby. A family tree that the whole family contributes to becomes the family record.

Common mistakes beginners make

• Trying to do it all at once. Set yourself a small target — your four grandparents and their parents. That's already 14 people, and you'll learn a lot doing it.
• Skipping sources. When you add a date or a place, jot down where you got it. "Birth date: 1942 (per Aunt Ruth)" is more useful than "Birth date: 1942" with no provenance.
• Erasing conflicting info. If two relatives disagree about a date, record both. The discrepancy itself is a clue.
• Not adding deceased relatives. The tree includes everyone — your great-grandparents are as important as your nieces.
• Waiting for the "perfect" tool. Start with whatever you have. You can always migrate later.

Your first week

Here's a realistic plan:

• Day 1: Write down everyone you know off the top of your head. ~30 minutes.
• Day 2: Call or text your parents. Add what they know.
• Day 3: Pick the oldest relative you can reasonably call. Set up a 1-hour conversation.
• Day 4–6: Do the call. Record it. Add what you learn to the tree.
• Day 7: Send your draft tree to two other relatives for them to fill in or correct.

By the end of the first week you'll have 30–60 people mapped, and you'll know exactly which branches need more work. That's the start.