When beginning the oft strange and always fascinating journey into your roots, the more information you are armed with the better. The best place to begin is with yourself. This can be acheived the 'old fashioned way' with pen and paper or via computer and a genealogy program.

Write down your name, including maiden if female and married, your birthdate, date of marriage and full name of spouse if applicable, your children, etc. You have just created your very first family group sheet. Do the same for each of your siblings. Now your parents and grandparents. What are their names dates of birth, death if applicable, date of marriage, chilren's names? Now we are building our family tree!

Before we go any further, we must discuss a most important subject, SOURCING YOUR RESEARCH. From personal experience I can assure you it is easier to "source as you go" than to go back and do it later. If your source was from personal knowledge, say so, if Great Aunt Lucy told it to you, say so. If you got the information from a document, such as a birth certificate, say so and tell where it is recorded. If you found it on the internet as part of someone else's file SAY SO. Always give credit to those whose research enhanced your own.

Now we are up to great grandparents, we are now having to rely on census records and other public documents to ferret out our ancestors. This is where computers and the internet have bot greatly enhanced and set back genealogy research. So much information is NOT proven and has no documentaion and in many cases just plain can not be duplicated, that it is very much a jungle out there. At best any genealogy trees, descendancies etc., on the internet that have no source information or documentation stated can not be duplicated it can only be used as a guide.