Write On!

              22 it is a future goal. Our second cousin has supplied much of the information for the family website and has helped further our research in Illinois. Such successes in the hobby of genealogy are not uncommon. In fact, they are one of the things that keep people motivated and interested to continue. You may wonder where to start with your own family. The best place to start is with the older members of your family. An enormous amount of information is available only for the asking. Interview the senior members of your family and map our a preliminary sketch of what your family tree looks like. Find our particularly where people were born and where they grew up. Dates or approximate dates will help you as you flesh out the information with further research. Ask family to write down their stories or get them to dictate them to be typed out and edited later. Some families have documents such as birth certificates, marriage certificates, death certificates, or legal documents that all contain invaluable information for the researcher. Gather this information together and start keeping it in a binder or filing cabinet in some sort of order. You will, over time, collect so much information that it is important, right from the start, to keep everything organized. The next step is to put the information that you have into a genealogy software program. There are several programs available. There are important aspects that the software must include. These are the ability to record the sources of your information and the ability to generate a GEDCOM or text file only, which contains your information in a format that any other genealogy program can use. Any program must have these two components to be useful. Ask other family members, who may be conducting genealogy research, what program they are using and it may be prudent to use the same program. I am using Family Tree Maker on the advice of a family member who has documented hundreds of names in a large Ukrainian family tree belonging to my mother-in-law. Family Tree Maker has the ability to generate family trees in many formats, some of which our cousin has shared in large wall displays at family reunions. These are always eye catching and a huge interest is shown in seeing where each person fits in the whole scheme. After choosing your software, start by entering your own name, birth date, marriage date, place of birth; then progress to children, parents and grandparents. The fun is beginning. A subscription to a genealogy website is useful at this point and well worth the money expended. Subscriptions can