From the Gould Genealogy blog:
The UK’s first ever Start Your Family Tree Week will be launched on December 26. It’s Britian’s first ever family history awareness campaign, and is supported by Find My Past, Genes Reunited, the Society of Genealogists, the Federation of Family History Societies, Eneclann, My-History, Pen and Sword Books, Your Family Tree Magazine and BBC Who Do You Think You Are Magazine, Family Tree Magazine and Martha Lane Fox.
This follows results of a survey showing that 42% of the population have started researching their ancestors. The week is designed to make the most of the internet to discover family history.
From Boxing Day 2010 right through to New Year’s Day there’ll be special offers and activities available every day, including free getting started guides, printable charts, discounts, competitions, and lots more.
I think this is a great idea and I’d like to see Australia take this up too! We can all encourage our friends and family to start researching their family history!!
If you’re not researching your family you can start by writing down your personal details – date of birth, marriage, children and then go on to your siblings, parents, grandparents, aunties, uncles. Just put in as much as you know. You can download a pedigree chart to start recording, use an online family tree like ancestry.com.au or download a free family tree software program for your computer. As it says in the above article there will be free getting started guides and printable charts available from various genealogy vendors. It’s worth reading the whole article and following the links to help you get started with your family tree. If you do decide to start your own family tree I’d love it if you’d leave me a comment! Also if you have any questions I’ll try and answer them too!! 🙂 All the best in your research!!!
Well, we have this:
http://www.naa.gov.au/whats-on/events/shake-your-family-tree-2011.aspx
Thanks for that Michael, I hadn't heard about it, I'll post it now and will try and get along to that one myself!!
Regards, Kylie 🙂
I've recently started researching my family tree in my (not so copious) spare time, but it seems to get overwhelming pretty quickly. How do you define your "borders" of where you stop looking for your ancestors? Do you only look within your direct line? What about a spouse's line? Or do you spread out into cousins, second cousins, etc.
I started out doing first my maternal grandmother's line, just the pedigree with just vital statistics (bdm). When I got as far as I could with that then I started filling in the cousins etc. Then I did maternal grandfather's. It's a couple of years later and I'm now going back and filling in more details of my ancestor's everyday lives.
It's really a personal thing as to how far you go along lines of cousins but to get started I would try and stick to immediate ancestors.
Some people set goals as to what they want to achieve in a given time period. I don't do this but I do restrict myself to working on one area at a time.
Hope this helps!!
Kylie 🙂