Whether you’re a history buff or you just want to learn more about your family’s roots, getting into genealogy can be a fun and rewarding pursuit.

There’s nothing quite like uncovering information from your family’s past to help you learn more about yourself. Like a journey of self-discovery, each fact you uncover helps you understand a bit more about who you are and where you came from.

Although not the most detailed document, normally, a family tree is a great way to get started. In its most basic form, a family tree is a flow chart of sorts that starts with a distant relative. Set up in blocks that descend from the farthest past to the most recent at the bottom, the tree shows the way a family grows and branches.

Built like a corporation’s organizational chart, a family tree includes within its block names and dates for births, deaths and sometimes marriages. The blocks on the tree clearly show their connection back to the original patriarch or matriarch.

For example, if your tree starts with your grandfather, it would show a connection of marriage to your grandmother. It would then show the branches that belong to your parents and the other offspring, if any, of your grandparents. It would then move on down through the generations.

Even in its best form, a family tree is just a roadmap to the past, listing dates and names. The details that are often so much fun to find in genealogical research are generally not present. Despite this, a tree is a good tool for those getting ready to do some major research to employ.

Start out by creating your tree and filling in as much information as possible. Then backtrack and create documents, scrapbooks or journals for each member on the tree. Their stories can be a few paragraphs or pages and pages, depending on how much luck you’ve had researching. The more details you can find, the more three-dimensional your ancestors will become.

Don’t worry if you can’t find a lot of information on every person on your tree, just concentrate on those whose stories you can flesh out and your simple family tree will soon become a project that’s an instant heirloom for generations to come.

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