Improve your family history research notes

Taking effective family history research notes, and keeping them well organised, is crucial to getting the most out of your research. Your research notes are the foundation for planning, analysing and documenting the information you gather during the research process. Effective research notes will make your research easier and your family history more accurate.

Benefits of effective family history research notes

Good family history research notes help you:

• collect better information and generate a more accurate family history
• document the sources that provided information and where to find them
• develop ideas, discover research leads and plan your research
• analyse sources and determine whether there is sufficient evidence to support your conclusions
• create products to share with others, such as family tree charts, reports, stories, blog posts, presentations, articles or books.

How to take effective family history research notes

The specific approach that you take to family history research notes will depend on personal preference, the tools you have or choose to use, the way that you like to work, cost and your research needs.

However, your approach should have these characteristics:

• Systematic: You need a system that encourages consistency and saves you time.
• Relevance: Your notes need to be relevant to your research questions and goals.
• Clarity: Your notes need to make sense to you in the future and state the sources of information.
• Accessibility: You need to be able to find your notes easily and access them when needed.

Examples of family history research notes

Note sure about what to include in your family history research notes? Here are some examples:

• Why you decided you found the right person
• What you searched for and did not find
• Analysis of information, evidence and sources
• Evidence that supports a conclusion
• Inconsistencies or doubts
• How you resolved inconsistencies
• Definitions and new terms
• Ideas of where to look next and what to look for
• Anything that you do not have enough information about or do not understand that needs further investigation, e.g. medical terminology.

More information

This article is the start of a series about family history research notes, so stay tuned for more!

Next post in this series: How to take effective research notes

For more of my articles on documenting your family history, go to the Document page.

Read more about improving the quality of your family history in my book, The Good Genealogist.

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