Family history research works backward. You start with yourself, move to your parents, then to your grandparents, and you prove each generation before you move on to the next one. Most of the trouble people run into later comes from skipping that order and attaching their family to an online tree that looked close enough.
Note that an online family tree is not a record. It is someone else's conclusion, and it may or may not be supported by any document.
Start With What Is Already in the House
Before you pay for anything, go through what your family already has. A filing cabinet, a box of photographs, or a grandmother's Bible will often give you 2 or 3 generations for free, and it gives you the names, dates and places you need before records searching will work at all. Look for:
Ask the Oldest Relatives Now
Interview the oldest people in your family before you do anything else, because this is the one source that disappears. Ask for full names including maiden names, dates and places of birth, marriage and death, where the family lived, what church they attended, and where people are buried. Write down or record the answers the same day.
Keep in mind that memory is not proof. What an aunt remembers is a place to look, not a fact to enter in your tree. Sometimes a single remembered county name is enough to find the whole family in the census.
Record Where Every Fact Came From
Pick somewhere to keep the tree, either genealogy software on your own computer or a free online tree such as the FamilySearch Family Tree. Which one you pick matters less than the habit of writing down where each fact came from: the name of the record, its year, and where you saw it. This is the step beginners skip, and it is the only thing that will tell you, 5 years from now, whether a date came from a death certificate or from a stranger's tree.
Move to the Census First
A federal census has been taken every 10 years since 1790, and each one is released to the public 72 years after it was taken. The 1950 census was released on 1 April 2022 and is the most recent one available. Every census from 1850 forward names each person in the household, which makes it the fastest way to assemble a family group. Before 1850, only the head of household is named and the rest of the household appears as tick marks.
The census is free to search on FamilySearch, which requires a free account. Note that ages and birthplaces in the census are often wrong. The census taker wrote down what whoever answered the door told him, and that was sometimes a neighbor rather than a member of the family.
Then Look for Vital Records
Once you know roughly when and where a birth, marriage or death happened, look for the certificate. Some U.S. states did not record births, marriages, and deaths until the 1900s, so an early ancestor may have no certificate at all. Recent birth, marriage, and death certificates may be protected by privacy laws, which vary by state, and can generally be ordered from the state government for a fee.
When you are ready to look for a particular record, start with the census and vital records sections of our records directory for the state and county where your ancestor lived. From there, do a place search in the FamilySearch Catalog by county name, since a great deal of what FamilySearch holds is not in the main search index. A few records are not online and are only available by contacting the local courthouse. When the online trail runs out, a genealogical society or public library in that county is worth contacting directly.
Need help finding more records? We have genealogy research services available. You can also try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1.3 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.