How I Got Started
Once upon a time, many years ago, being in possession of boxes of photographs, some of my own, some given to me by my mother and my grandmothers, I decided to get organized and put the photos into scrapbooks. So I bought several and sorted the photos by chronological order and put them into the scrapbooks. It turned out the first scrapbook contained photos of various ancestors and unknown relatives of those ancestors, as well as photos my mother had had of myself and my baby brother, taken before we moved to California. So I decided to add a hand drawn pedigree of myself to the first page of that scrapbook, as a kind of introduction. I had seen pedigree charts, so had a general idea of what they looked like. More years passed, and every now and again I would find out something new about an ancestor, or even find out the name of a previously unknown ancestor, and I would occasionally get around to adding this information to my little chart.
In 1996 I got computerized, buying an Apple Power Macintosh 7100/66 and 17" Sony monitor, plus an Apple 15" monitor from a friend. Thus equipped I began to learn how to use these things, got on the Internet, and discovered the joys of web surfing and email. And, of course, as I experimented with search engines, I did a search on my name. So it was I discovered a web site that had a genealogy of one branch of my mother's side of the family. It listed my grandfather as Buck Cotton, as he was called by relatives. Since his actual name was James, I figured the information on the site just had to have come from some relative of mine, rather than public records, so I got in touch with the owner of the web site, and from there got in touch with some cousins still living in Illinois. Not only did I learn that my great aunt was still alive, and nearing her hundreth birthday, but I learned a bit more about genealogy, pedigrees, and that I could trace my ancestry back to a David Isat, born in Scotland in 1775. Wow! I thought that was pretty cool. I even exchanged some photos via email with my new-found correspondents, and put up some old family photos on my first web site, all this before the new millenium rolled around.
First Steps
So here are some things to do to start your genealogical research, based on my own experience:
Once you have your program, start experimenting with various ways of out-putting the information. I found that one of the most useful outputs was a visual pedigree such as this:
It is immediately obvious that I need more information on the Chisms, since I have Frank Meyer-Frank Harvey-Harvey, and then nothing at all. Ditto for Meyer. I can also see that Richard Stults might yield more information, since there is an exact date of birth, and the place of his son's birth is also known. James Isham Hollingsworth also looks promising, since I have an exact birthdate and the place of birth. I now have a good idea of what I need to do next.
