Genealogy for Dummies

Being inexperienced, ignorant and naive can be tough in many areas, but perhaps particularly to genealogists. One year of experience in genealogy has taught me that it is a good idea not to be ignorant even in the beginning. At the same time, I am completely taken by all the wonderful tools available and all the incredibly enthusiastic people engaged in family research. The first genealogist I came into contact with a very experienced genealogist who devoted much of his life to publishing a newsletter in the area. I found when searching on the web that he has produced information on an alleged relative of me in the 1600s. (Just a lucky stroke because I did not know A BIT on how to do). Anyway he lived in my neck of the woods so I called him and he immediately invited me home to talk. This incredibly knowledgeable and nice person spent over two hours for me and gave me all the issues he had left of his newsletter, and extracts from his database concerning my relatives. When we said goodbye he said: "Take it easy with family research. Remember that there are other things in life. It is easy to overdo it, so you forsaken everything else. So weird people I have met among genealogists are not common anywhere else." During my first year as genealogists I have realize that he was really right. At least my wife thinks that I am a bit one-sided in my interests and could be a little more social at times and I have encountered quite fundamentalist people during my travels on the web. Above all, I have as a novice felt quite lost among all the "besserwissers" I have encountered at various genealogists-sites.

I therefore wish to share my thoughts and experiences - and they are not very advanced - with you who are in the same situation I was a year ago, ie. total ignorance about the most basic of family research. I was so ignorant that I did not even understand beginner instructions in the most popular books or on the various genealogists-sites on the web.

For you to understand my deep ignorance, I can tell - though I blush with shame - that I had not a clue what proband meant or clearly understood the difference between ancestors and descendants, let alone could interpret the relationship of a tree numbered with Kekules' system. Now I have at least taught me enough to make jokes and write about it.

For those who expect advanced advice like those you may find in countless books on the subject will be disappointed. For those who wish to hear about ordeales from a total beginner and get answers to questions so stupid that a serious genealogists or primer on the subject would never deal with them, it may be useful and perhaps a good time, to follow my comments.

/This text was first published in January 2007/