Documenting your sources
Tracing your family history can be a thrilling experience, but don’t let your enthusiasm hamper your future efforts, as Simon Wills explains
RESEARCH TECHNIQUE
Simon Wills
Researching your family tree – or any genealogy project – can be very exciting and it’s tempting to race through all your sources, gathering as much data as you can and quickly extending your knowledge. But stop! It’s important to take time to record where you’ve searched. There are a number of reasons for this.
Why bother?
Firstly, you need to keep track of where you’ve looked so you don’t spend ages going through the same sources all over again at some point in the future. Often family history research is done in a piecemeal fashion and there’re so many different sources that it’s easy to forget what you’ve already seen – particularly if the same records are available from several different providers. Nobody is keen to waste time hunting through a set of records that they investigated thoroughly six months ago.