How Do I Look Up My Family Tree?

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Donna Barnes, life and relationship coach here in New York City and the author of It's All About You. In this clip we'll talk about how do I lookup my family tree? And the first and best way is to go to the oldest living family member that you have and talk to them about it. I think they'd love to know that you're interested in hearing more about the family and see what you can find out from them. See what kind of keepsakes that they have that they can share with you either from weddings with guest books or from birth announcements, any kind of records that they've saved that can help you out with names and dates and things like that. A lot of things you can just simply find on the Internet. If you know names, you can get birth certificate, death certificate, marriage certificates, all from doing a search online. A great way to also lookup people then is there's family history centers in most states. The biggest one is in Salt Lake City, Utah so if you don't live near there, you could certainly look. They're internationally known and they're open to the public, you can go in and you can sit at their computer and they've done a lot of that work for you, they have family trees already so you might get lucky and find that they've done your tree already, you just need to tap into it. But the Internet is a fabulous source. You can Google anybodies name that you have and see what kind of information you can come up with them and then you also want to be organized. You want to have some sort of filing system to keep all that information. There's also some great websites that allow you to fill in the actual tree and save it for a small fee. So but it's a great opportunity if you do have living family members to really talk to them and get to know a little bit about their history. If you don't have family members, then the Internet is a fabulous place to start and just Google your name, your parent's names, whatever you do know. This is Donna Barnes from New York City."