Keeping your family tree manageable

When I first started recording my family tree, I found it overwhelming and complicated. Although by no means a professional genealogist, I've been doing it long enough to feel confident in giving some tips that I've personally found helpful:

1. Start with yourself and work your way back. I know this sounds like a no-brainer, but it still needs to be said.

2. I know I've said this before, but document all people and facts in your family tree. Yes, it's a pain in the butt, and not particularly fun, but you want to make sure your tree is as accurate as possible. It's better to have blanks than to have information, people, or entire lines that might not be correct.

Some records and sources to look for include birth, marriage, and death records, census records, and histories. Histories can sometimes not be entirely accurate, so you have to be careful there, but they're far more reliable than Joe Schmo's unsourced online gedcom file.

2. Only include people from whom you're directly descended (great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents, etc). Forget your ancestors' siblings; if you try to include them, your tree will be an absolute mess. Later you might want to include some of your more prominent aunts and uncles, but for now at least, enter only your direct ancestors.

What I personally do for those ancestors who are siblings or cousins of someone notable is just mention the connection in my notes. For example, I wrote in the notes for my 8th great-grandmother Sarah Hathorne Coker that she was the sister of Salem Witch trial judge John Hathorne (who was also the 2nd great-grandfather of author Nathaniel Hawthorne).

3. Limit the number of generations back you're going to go; right now I'm going back only to the ancestors who came to America (8th through 12th great grandparents). Later you can always push back further, but at first this will help keep your family tree more manageable and you less overwhelmed.

4. Understand that you are going to hit dead ends and roadblocks; you will not be able to go back 10 generations with every line in your family. I only hit the genealogical motherlode on my maternal side because her family has been in America since the 1620's and 30's and New England records were well preserved-- and even on those lines there are blanks. My paternal side of the tree is much more sparse because Irish and Jewish records just aren't there.

5. Lastly, if you're feeling overwhelmed, walk away from your genealogy research for a bit and come back to it later. It'll be there waiting for you.