Family history research questions help us focus our research on the information and sources that are needed to progress our research.
Research questions help us take a more systematic approach to research. We use research questions to conduct a reasonably exhaustive search to find the best sources to progress our family history.
Read my article: Focus your research with research questions
How can we generate family history research questions?
Research questions based on family groups
All of our ancestors can be grouped together into family groups. For many cultures, a family group is mother, father and their children, but you can create family groups in any way that is meaningful to you.
Compile a list of the family groups and make a list of the information that you still need for each family group. Then turn each one into one or more research questions.
Example:
Family group: Samuel Hen and Sophia Squires (and children)
Missing information: birth dates and locations of parents
Research questions:
When and where was Samuel Hen born?
When and where was Sophia Squires born?
If generating research questions for all of your family groups seems too overwhelming, break it down into manageable chunks and work through them systematically.
You could:
- focus on one of your four grandparent lines at a time
- work through your family groups by generation, starting with your parents, then grandparents, then great grandparents and so on
- generate questions just for the family groups you are currently working on, then work systematically along their family lines.
Research questions based on research aims
Family history research questions that are relevant to our broader aims are more likely to help us progress our research and keep us motivated.
In this technique, you start by listing 2-4 broad aims for your research. These are the ‘big questions’ and areas of interest that are likely to take more than a year to achieve.
Example aims:
- I’d like to get my family tree back as far as I can in time
- I’d like my family tree to be as accurate as possible. Can I prove some of the stories and fix up errors?
- I’d like to explore the families and stories of my early convicts and settlers
- My father was adopted – I’d like to trace his biological family
Choose one of your aims, then break it down into smaller chunks and write research questions about each chunk.
Tree Health Assessment
I developed the Tree Health Assessment tool to evaluate the accuracy of a family tree as a surrogate for a family history. You can download an article about it from my Free Stuff page.
After you complete the assessment, sections of your family tree will be coloured green, yellow or pink. Green is where you have sufficient evidence, yellow has some evidence but needs more work and pink has no evidence.
You should always move from the ‘known’ to the ‘unknown’, so choose a yellow section that branches off from a green, then examine the information that is missing. What evidence do you need to turn it from yellow to green? Write your research questions based on achieving this objective.
More information
For more of my articles about planning your family history, go to the Plan page.
For information about the families used in these examples, go to my family history website, Rustenivy.
Post last updated 18 June 2024
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