If you are fortunate enough to help someone new to family history research, try not to overwhelm them with suggestions, every source you can think of, or citation advice. Sometimes too much new material, new information, and new family members can add to the confusion “new” people sometimes feel.
If anything, try and encourage them to work initially on a family that doesn’t seem too difficult to research. There’s time later for them to become totally confused and frustrated with brick walls.
Give a suggestion or two of what to try next and suggest that they ask you again when they’ve tried those suggestions. And go from there.
Ideally you want to keep the person’s interest and let it grow slowly.
4 Responses
Yes, very good advice. You put ur toe in the water slowly then add ur foot then ankle and so on. Genealogy is like that too. Mine kind of fell in my lap but pops up in the most unexpected places.
One should never start the task of Genealogy without knowing how to do it. I’ve always felt that the only proper way for anyone starting to do Genealogy is to find a professional genealogist who is a trained genealogy teacher, locate and attend your local Genealogy Society (taking starting up classes teaching and on hands steps) or go to your LDS family History Library with trained consultants who are used to showing a new comer how to do correct Genealogy. Anyone who is serious about doing their Family History has to follow certain proper steps (one by one) and not learn by hit and miss. This only causes errors upon errors, creates unnecessary cost and problems along the way. The above are the people who have been trained on all Genealogy Procedure Steps, educated themselves by taking Genealogy classes and attending conferences, conventions, lectures by professionals and done extensive reading and spent many years of doing the work (perhaps working with DAR, Mayflower, UEL or etc. as a Register). These are the people who can show you how to follow the proper procedures in the proper order, eliminate making the bad mistakes of many (Probably by accepting work of other relatives with many errors and not correcting them) and avoid all the other unnecessary errors plus ending up with the wrong Ancestors. Remember Researcher means doing a careful, systematic, patient study to establish facts (and document), and to investigate thoroughly all possible available leads. Genealogy means to establish your line of descent by thoroughly researching. This takes many years of work and it is most often stated that one never really completes this task. Doing one’s family Genealogy is taking on a dedicated task and assuming it is going to be a long time before the job is every done.
Do caution them not to get excited about matches on My Heritage, LDS or Ancestor and immediately accept them into their family tree (like I did), but rather to verify each match before adding. It sure prevents running down some rabbit holes and then having to ‘repair’ your tree.
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