How does genealogy work?

Question:

How does genealogy work?

I go to these websites and put in a name and it comes back with a zillion results and want me to pay money to view them. How do I know which ones are my family. I really want to trace my geneology, but I just can't figure it out at all. Can anyone help me?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: The first thing to understand is that the online records only have dead people in them. It seems obvious, but people keep trying to find themselves and their parents online...but genealogists protect the privacy rights of the living at all costs. So when you start your search, you may have to start with grandparents or even the grandparents of your grandparents. For most people, that means talking to your family, both immediate and distant, to document all the people they know.

For a beginner, download a program called PAF (Personal Ancestral File) from the Mormon's Family History site. It's a free program and a great way to organize yourself. http://www.familysearch.org

The site I just gave you is the first place to go to look for information...but it comes with a caveat. It's full of bad information. It's only a place to start. You honestly need to research every last person on those trees and double check the accuracy of every set of parents for every person to make sure you're still on the right tree. People make a lot of leaps in logic when they're researching, and they rarely include their sources. Take it only as a guide if you find information on your family on there...don't believe it's all true or even partially true.

From there, go to the largest library in your area and check out their genealogy resources. You'll find most US and Canadian library systems subscribe to one of two programs that are very helpful: Ancestry.com or Heritage Quest. Both have their benefits and drawbacks. But the benefit of accessing them through your library is that they pay for the subscription and you get access to the full membership for free. You just need a library card. Many even have portals where you can sign on from home.

While at the library, you'll also find things like census records on microfilm, local obituaries on the newspaper films, large reference books like "Germans to America" and the "Wurtemberg Emigration Index". You'll find records from your state that will never find their way online, especially histories of local counties and the people who pioneered them.

Finally, once you're really organized and have a game plan, take a day to visit your state archives and state library. These are the mack daddies of research sites. They have things onsite that you have to pay a lot of money to rent through the LDS. Most of all, they usually have copies of the newspapers from throughout your state, the naturalization records from local courts that predate a national Immigration and Naturalization program, and birth records from throughout the state.