Start with the people who are still here
Nearly everybody starts family history in the wrong place, by buying access to a records site and searching a surname. The records will still be there next year. The person who remembers which village their mother came from, and what the man in the photograph was called, may not be, and no archive holds that. The phone is unusually good at this first part: it records, it photographs, it transcribes, and it does all three in somebody's front room without any equipment at all.
The first weekend, before you pay for anything
- Write down what you already know, badly Names, approximate dates, places, in any order. The gaps in that list are your research questions, and they are more useful than a search box.
- Record the oldest relative you can reach Ask permission, put the phone on the table, and let them talk. An hour of audio is worth more than any document, and the details you did not think to ask about are in it.
- Photograph the backs of the photographs The writing on the back is the evidence. A box of photographs with no backs recorded loses half its value the moment the person who knew the faces is gone.
- Photograph the documents in the house Certificates, letters, the flyleaf of a family bible, the inscription in a book. Flat, in daylight, with the whole page in frame.
- Write down where each thing came from Whose house, whose photograph, who told you. This is the difference between a family tree and a rumour, and it is the habit that separates careful work from the copied trees online.
- Only then go looking for records You now know what you are looking for, which is what makes a subscription worth paying for rather than an expensive way to browse.
Advertisement
The apps that do the work
Ancestry. The largest commercial collection, strongest on censuses, and the app is a usable way to add people and attach records on the move. Subscription based, and the hint system will happily lead you into other people's mistakes.
MyHeritage. Better coverage than its rival in much of Europe, and its photograph tools are the best of any of these: enhancing, colourising and animating scanned family pictures. Also subscription based.
PhotoScan. Scans a print without the glare that ruins a straight photograph of a framed or glossy picture. The right tool for a box of prints, and free.
Genius Scan. For documents rather than photographs: edge detection, deskewing and a clean PDF per certificate. Fast enough to do a whole folder in an afternoon.
CamScanner. The alternative, with text recognition that will read typed documents well and handwriting poorly, which is about what anybody should expect.
Easy Voice Recorder. Plain, reliable recording with no account and no cloud requirement. The one to have open on the table during the conversation.
Evernote. Where the interviews, the scans and your own notes can live together and be searched, including the text inside photographed documents.
Obsidian. The alternative for people who would rather own plain files: one note per person, linked to each other, stored wherever you choose. Genealogy is a linking problem and this handles it naturally.
Markor. The minimal version of that idea. Plain text, no account, no format that will go obsolete before the research does.
Keep. For the small things: a name half heard, a village, a question to ask next time. The research notebook rather than the archive.
Wikipedia. Background for a place, a regiment, an industry or an epidemic. Knowing what was happening where your family lived explains most sudden moves and most gaps.
Google Earth. Find the farm, the street or the parish. Its historical imagery shows what was there before a road went through, which is often the reason an address no longer exists.
OsmAnd. Offline maps with footpaths and small settlements, for an actual visit to a churchyard in a place with no signal.
Google Translate. Its camera mode will get you the sense of a record in a language you do not read. Treat the result as a hint and have anything important translated properly.
Remini. Restores detail in a damaged or very small photograph. Use it on a copy and keep the original scan, because what it produces is a plausible reconstruction rather than the photograph.
Google Drive. Where the scans go, in folders named by person and place, so the work survives the phone. Storage is the whole archive here and it deserves a moment's thought.
Dropbox. The same job, with cleaner handling of a folder shared with a cousin who is doing the other half of the family.
What counts as evidence, and what does not
| What you have | How much it is worth | What to do with it |
|---|---|---|
| A birth, marriage or death certificate | Strong, with the informant named | Note who reported it and when |
| A census entry | Strong for a household on one night | Ages in them are frequently wrong |
| A parish register entry | Strong, and often the only source | Record the register and page |
| A gravestone | Good, but carved by the living | Photograph the whole stone |
| Another person's online tree | No evidence at all | Treat as a hint to check yourself |
| A family story | Valuable, rarely accurate in detail | Record it as a story, not a fact |
About the DNA tests, briefly and honestly
A DNA test is good at two things: confirming or breaking a documented link, and finding relatives who also tested. It is poor at the thing it is sold on, which is the percentage breakdown by region. Those estimates are comparisons against reference panels and they change, sometimes substantially, when a company updates its panel.
The results are also permanent and they are about your relatives as much as about you. Read what the company may do with the sample and the data, whether it can be deleted, and what happens if the business is sold. That is a decision to make once, carefully, rather than a feature to enable.
Record the oldest relative first, photograph the backs, write down where everything came from. Pay for records once you know what you are looking for.
Frequently asked questions
Do I have to pay for a records subscription?
Eventually, for the large commercial collections, though many national archives and libraries offer free access, sometimes from inside a library building. Do the free work first so that a month's subscription is spent answering specific questions.
Is a tree I find online reliable?
No. Trees copy each other, and a mistake made once in 2009 is now in thousands of them. Use them to find records, then check the records yourself.
What should I photograph if I only have one visit?
The backs of photographs, any certificates, the flyleaf of a bible and the faces of the oldest people in the room, with names written down. In that order.
How do I keep the research usable in twenty years?
Plain files with clear names, in storage you control, with a note of the source for each one. Every genealogy service on this list may change hands; a folder of scans and a text file will not.
Read next
Nothing has infected your phone. Something you installed has permission, and the fix is a list in settings.
A phone will happily run a keyboard, a mouse and a memory stick. It will not power a desktop hard drive.
Hard and fast are different things. Almost every game confuses them, and these do not.
