Where does one start

Each person who comes to genealogy arrives here for their own reason.

Maybe they want to see if that family story about there being Indian in the family was true. Maybe they want to see how long one of their lines has been in America. Maybe they're only attempting to help one of their children with a school project. Maybe, like me, they only wanted to get the works of one of their ancestors preserved before time destroyed all those papers.

The reason is not important. The reason usually doesn't limit one on how far they go with tracing their family.

But where does one start?

In your own home. Who do you have the information about? Yourself.

When were you born? Where were you born? When and where were your married?

Who was/is your father? Who was/is your mother. When and where were they born? When and where were they married?

Do you have siblings? What are their names? When and where were they born? Are they married? If so, to whom? When and where was their spouse born? When and where were they married?

For each of these people, you'll eventually want to ask permission to see a copy of their birth certificate and marriage license. For any of the above people who may have passed on already, you'll want to see a copy of their death certificate. You'll want to note where they were buried or if they were cremated what became of the ashes. You don't have to state that you have the ashes, just something like "the ashes were given to family."

And once you complete one generation, you'll go back another generation. If you're only doing a direct line, meaning you, your parents, their parents, their parents, etc., etc., etc., you'll have fewer people to keep track of as you document their lives. The down side to this is it doesn't take long before you run out of people to ask about your ancestors. If you include their siblings and then follow those lines back down to the current living generations, you'll find people who actually knew your great uncle, the brother of your grandmother. The chances are they'll have different family stories than you grew up listening to. They'll have their own set of pictures. Sharing with your relatives who want to start their own collection is easy. Scan the image and everyone can have their own copy.

But as you go up the tree to the older generations, you'll need these other relatives to help you in the search. Each family had a family Bible. But only one child was able to have it passed on to them. So if great, great, great grandma and grandpa had seven children, six lines down to your generation don't realize that family Bible even exists. The family with the Bible probably don't have any idea what happened to your great, great grandmother who is listed in his family Bible. For all he knows she died without every marrying.

As you can see, where it starts is the easy part. Where it ends is up to you.

The important thing...start it. Don't talk about it, do it. And don't forget to document everything you state as fact. List the source for each fact. You'll thank yourself when your family tree of 20 people grows to 200 or 2000 or 20000.

Have fun.