Tracing Your Ancestors With A Family Tree

Building your family tree will give you a fascinating journey back over time. Your family tree will be much more interesting if you can add photos of each of the individuals. To do this you will need a Family Tree Photo Digitizing Service to scan your old photographs and slides, so that they can be added to the online Family Tree.

How To Build Your Family Tree

When building your family tree then you should start with yourself. Retrieve your birth certificate and note the details of where you were born, the date, your parents full names, and your mother’s maiden name. You can find help here on how to research your family history

Then recall all the places where you have lived, (note as much detail about the address as possible, where you went to school, your marriage(s), and children.

Then next step is to research your parents’ lives. As you go back in time the work will become harder and maybe there will not be any photos to scan to add to the Family Tree. This work will be much easier if your parents, grandparents, and great grandparents are still alive, so it is better to consider building a Family Tree sooner rather than later.

Make sure that you record your findings in safe place so that future generations can continue your work and keep your Family Tree up to date long after you too have become an “ancestor.”

Identify What You Know and Use Home Sources

A large part of creating your family free will consist of gathering and organising family records. When you access each document add them to the list of supporting documentation that will support your Family Tree chart.

The following documents will be especially useful when constructing your Family Tree:

• Birth, religious records, graduation, marriage, military, and occupational records
• Death certificates, burial records, and obituaries
• Yearbooks, newspaper articles, family letters, social activity mementos, sports awards, and other documents that might provide names, dates, and locations

that they collected and handed down throughout their lives.

Make copies and label all items your family have collected to document the source and make a digital scan of them whenever possible. Digitize Media also offer a service to scan non-stapled documents https://woocommerce-776436-2649028.cloudwaysapps.com/terms-and-conditions/

Contacting Family Members

Creating your Family Tree is likely to take a long time so contact your oldest living relatives first. These elderly people will give a fascinating insight into their parents and grandparents that you will not get anywhere else.

The types of questions might include the following:

• Where did they live?
• In what part of the country?
• What kind of home did they live in?
• What were their addresses?
• When and where were their relatives (this could include their siblings) born?
• When did these relatives die, and where are they buried?

To assist their memories, take along some of your old family photos and ask them to show their old family records, letters, and photos. Take copies of these documents with your camera, phone, or a portable scanner.

A lot of the information will be just verbal so make notes on your computer or record the conversation on your phone.  Another interesting thing that you will come across is that you may hear different versions of the same story as each person will recall an event in a different way. You may want to pay a return visit to some relatives to clear up the story.

Remember that the elderly can get tired more quickly, so try to keep the meetings short and follow up if needed.

There are detailed publications available on and off-line to assist in creating you with much more information than this brief guide.

Family Tree Photo Digitizing Service

Digitize Media have digitized photos and slides many times in the past, so if you have any questions about our Family Tree Photo Digitizing Service then please feel free to call for a friendly chat.