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Best practices to follow to start, develop, and enjoy doing your genealogy.
Whether you're a beginner or advanced in researching your ancestors, it's essential to follow certain golden rules to progress efficiently and avoid mistakes. In this article, we present the five best practices to adopt to start, develop, and enjoy doing your genealogy. Follow these wise tips and embark on the discovery of your family history with peace of mind!
This is THE most important golden rule: verify, verify, and verify again by cross-referencing sources!
But why is this important? Simply because it's the basis of any researcher's work: to rely on facts and evidence.
Many genealogists still use information contained in family trees published on online genealogy sites. However, these can contain errors! Errors in dates, places, homonyms, intentional or unintentional, which can have consequences for your entire genealogy.
To avoid these pitfalls, genealogists have several ways to find evidence, records, or other manuscripts from the period: online archives, visits to departmental archives, requests for records from municipalities and departments, records from genealogy circles...
The record is the key and the best way to verify, confirm, or refute the information found on online trees. This brings us to our second golden rule:
The document or ancient manuscript is the key to genealogy. It is therefore essential to make the most of it.
A document contains many useful pieces of information for developing your genealogy: dates, places, names and first names of close family, witnesses, godparents and godmothers, etc.
The document is also the best way to delve into the lives of your ancestors: could they sign? What were their professions? Who made up their social circle?
Recording all this information in notes, sources, on Geneafinder and/or on paper will save you a considerable amount of time!
And to obviously find a source again, note it down, cite it with its references.
Good organization will save you time and prevent many mistakes.
This golden rule invites you to find a good working method and, above all, to stick to it.
Organizing your genealogy involves systematically conducting your research, your way of recording information, recording it, naming sources and media...
This rigor will allow you to save time, avoid losing data, and enjoy diving back into your genealogy...
Genealogy is time-consuming, so the genealogist must be patient.
Genealogical blocks can be numerous, and taking a step back is always a good idea.
Sharing your genealogy is also a good way to help you unblock your genealogy.
Finally, be curious! You might already be if you decided one day to start genealogy. Being curious in genealogy means opening up to resources you wouldn't have imagined. You multiply online searches, visit Departmental Archives, read, dig, reread, connect, and keep an open mind! A lead is a lead, and it's through a force of leads that you eventually trace an ancestry...
You now have all the keys in hand to start your ancestor quest with peace of mind...
Happy researching!