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Family trees are important in all types of situation. Just to give a few reasons on that area, it does not matter if your adopted, or if your born into a family. A lot of where you came from is apart of who you are. Just look at the health reasons. Usually most people develope things those in their past family also developed.

Interested, well if your already reading you probably already know that point. I've been researched some of my family history, my mother has also, and so on and so forth down the line. Sometimes it's easy...other times it's almost inpossible to figure out whom is right.

tips:
1. Where to look:

Start with people you know. Looking into your grandmothers life....ask her. If you can't ask your parents or perhaps someone else that might know. Most people love to talk about things like this.

If you can find a date someone was born and where, county courthouses usually keep records, go on a treasure hunt to different areas of the world, or towns to the courthouses.

Internet *purrs*....best unkept secret of the year. Family Tree makers, Familytree.com, etc. Do a search by name, maiden name, and usually who they married. Sometimes once you find someone it snowballs. Believe it or not, there'a ALOT of people doing search, many times on the exact same people you do.

2. If you do find something, get proof. Almost like getting pulled over by a police officer, you have to have proof of insurance. Well guess what? Give up yet? People make mistakes, you need to find out who you found out about. Find out how they know about this, and most imporant of all try to get copies of important documents of the past...birth certificates, old family bible writtings, pictures.....because when you put it together..you'll thank me later.

3. Take it slow! Ok, ok, I'm the worst when it comes to slowing down. I've gone so far back it's like seeing Adam and Eve only 5 generations away....but your talking about scrolls of paper. I did not check things out to make sure it was correct, I didn't write down names and numbers of the people who had the info I had, nor did I find out how they found out. etc,etc. If I had taken my time to do it right the first time I would not have to start back over.

4. Filing system. I'm not going to tell you how to store all this info. Just for goodness sakes don't store it in your computer. I could imagine days, months, maybe even years suddenly being deleated due to some virus. If you feel like you have to, place it on two disk! Or some kind of memory.

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