Planning family history research helps you prioritise your efforts, avoid duplication, and identify the tasks still ahead, so you’re set up for research success. With good planning, you are more likely to find the information you need and identify the correct people to include in your family history.
Good family history is not something you complete in six to twelve months. It takes time to find the best information. Research planning provides a structure that makes this project easier and more effective. It helps you focus on the outcomes you need to achieve to advance your research and it provides a record of your progress so you can easily pick up where you left off.
The planning process helps you analyse information and evidence, and clarify what you need to do next. If you plan your family history research, you are less likely to experience a research challenge, a point where you are unable to advance in a particular area. And you are more likely to discover interesting information and stories that contribute to an engaging family history.
Research planning helps you create better family history.
Key principles for research planning
Understand the research process as a cycle, with clear steps undertaken in turn.
Consider people, events and information in their context. This helps you interpret them correctly. See Why Genealogists Must Research Places, Not Just People.
Take an information-based approach to research, rather than a source-based one. Start with the question you need answered, then look for the sources that can answer it, rather than starting with a source and seeing what it tells you.
Plan your research to include all types of evidence: documentary, DNA and oral.
Break your research down into a series of projects to make it more manageable.
Broaden your search beyond your direct ancestors when the direct evidence runs out. Looking at their family, friends, associates and neighbours often reveals the answer. See Broaden Your Genealogy Research: How to Use the FFANs Method.
The research planning cycle
Goals, Scoping, Tasks, Research and Review.
Step 1 Goals: Start by clearly identifying what you want to find out. Break this down into a hierarchy of aims, objectives, research questions and hypotheses. Your questions and hypotheses should be written to achieve your aims and objectives. See Focus Your Research with Research Questions. Write your hypotheses so they can be tested, and include an alternative hypothesis as well as your preferred one. This helps you avoid confirmation bias, where you only notice the evidence that supports what you already expect to find. See Using Hypotheses in Family History.
Step 2 Scoping: Next, review what you have already done, what is already known and what sources are available, before you commit time to new searches. See The Scoping Advantage: Why You Should Review What You Know.
Step 3 Tasks: Then identify research leads and tasks, including specific repositories and sources you need to check, and analyses that need to be undertaken. Aim for a reasonably exhaustive search of the relevant sources, rather than stopping at the first likely answer.
Step 4 Research: Carry out the tasks and new research.
Step 5 Review: Evaluate what you found, repeat the cycle.
Although this process has clearly defined steps that are undertaken in order, it is a dynamic and iterative process. There will be times when you work on more than one step at once, and times when you need to go back to a previous step. For example, when carrying out step 2, you may need to go back to step 1 to revise your research questions in light of what you find. You also need to go back to step 1 when you receive new DNA evidence, since this often opens up new lines of inquiry. See Research Planning with DNA.
Research planning tools
Document the research planning process so that it is available to guide your research over time.
Your research plan should include a research log, so your tasks and your progress are recorded together in one place. Keeping them apart makes it harder to see how your research has developed over time.
A research plan is a type of project plan and you can approach projects in many different ways, which means research plans can be constructed in many different ways.
You could plan at the level of a family group and have a research plan for each one. Or you could group them together, with one for each grandparent line or one master plan for your entire family history. See Create a Master Genealogy Research Plan in Excel. You could also have plans for projects that are not focused on a particular family, such as a one-place study or a DNA analysis project.
Research plans can be created in Word or Excel, or in project management apps such as Notion. See How to Create a Genealogy Research Plan in Excel and Plan Your Family History Research With Notion.
For best results:
- List tasks in your research plan under their relevant research questions, and cross-reference these questions to your aims and objectives.
- Keep your scoping documentation and analyses with your research plan. In Excel, add these to separate worksheets in the same workbook.
Next steps for your research plan
Good research planning follows a clear cycle: set your goals, scope what you already know, identify your tasks, carry out the research, then review what you found. Keeping your plan and your log together, and returning to your goals whenever new evidence comes in, is what turns planning from a one-off task into a habit that improves every project you work on.
If you are just starting out, read What You Need to Know When Starting Family History to build your foundations before you create your first plan. When your direct evidence runs out, the FFANs method will show you how to broaden your search. For a complete framework you can apply to any research problem, see The Good Genealogist.
About the author
Danielle Lautrec is a genealogy educator, researcher, and author of The Good Genealogist. With qualifications in history, family history, and historical archaeology, she teaches for the Society of Australian Genealogists. Danielle convenes the Society’s Legacy Software Users Group and the Source Citations Group and is co-convenor of the Society’s DNA Research Groups.