Family History for Beginners: Getting Started with FamilySearch
I put off family history for years because I assumed everything had already been done. One evening on FamilySearch proved that wrong — and the first week taught me almost everything a beginner actually needs to know. Here’s that week, step by step.
For most of my adult life, “family history” was a phrase other people said. The family history consultants in my ward said it cheerfully every few months. My mother said it with a hint of guilt. The missionaries said it when they found out I had pioneer ancestors and asked whether I’d ever looked them up. I always gave the same answer: “I’m pretty sure my grandma did all of that already.” It was a comfortable answer. It also turned out to be wrong, and finding out how wrong it was took exactly one evening.
What finally got me to open FamilySearch.org was embarrassingly small: my daughter came home from an activity with a four-generation chart and asked me to fill in the blanks. I got three generations in and realized I couldn’t remember my great-grandfather’s first name. The man whose farm stories I’d heard my whole childhood — I didn’t know whether he was a William or a Walter. So I made an account that night, mostly to fill in her chart. By the end of the week I had found him in the 1920 census, seen his actual handwriting on a draft card, and understood why people get hooked on this.
This article is that first week, written out the way I’d walk a friend through it. No prior experience assumed, no genealogy vocabulary required, and no pressure to become the family archivist by Sunday. Just the honest beginner’s path — including the parts that confused me, the mistakes I nearly made, and the small wins that make the whole thing stick.
Day One: The Free Account Takes Ten Minutes
The first thing to know about FamilySearch is that it is completely free, and it’s run by the Church as a service to everyone, member or not. No credit card, no trial period, no “premium tier” hiding the good stuff. In a world where most genealogy sites want a subscription before they’ll show you your own grandmother, this still surprises people.
Creating an account is ordinary website stuff: go to the registration page, give your name, birth date, a username and password, and an email address. If you already have a Church account, you can sign in with that instead — same login, one less password to remember. The only slightly unusual question is whether you’re a member of the Church, and that’s because members get a couple of extra features (like seeing which ancestors have temple ordinances completed). Answer honestly, confirm your email, and you’re in.
One tip from experience: use an email address you actually check. FamilySearch will occasionally send you notifications — a cousin messaged you, a hint was found on someone you’re watching, someone changed information on one of your people. Those messages turn out to be half the fun, and you don’t want them landing in an account you opened in 2011 and abandoned.
The Tree Starts With You (and Other Living People)
Here’s the part that surprises every beginner: you don’t start by typing in your famous pioneer ancestor. You start with yourself. FamilySearch builds trees from the present backward, so the first person you add is you — name, birth date, birthplace. Then your parents. Then your grandparents, as far back as you personally know.
This feels backwards at first. It’s actually the design working as intended, for two reasons. The first is practical: you are the world’s best source on yourself and your living family. Your birth certificate exists, but nobody needs it — you were there. The second reason is about privacy, and it matters enough to get its own paragraph.
On FamilySearch, living people are private by default. When you add your living mother to your tree, only you can see her. She exists in your private space, not in the shared public tree. Nobody else — not even your siblings — sees her entry unless you specifically share it. When she eventually passes away and someone marks her as deceased, her profile merges into the public tree and becomes visible to everyone. This is why you can’t just search the tree for your living cousin: living people are walled off, deliberately. It also means you’ll end up adding the same living relatives your siblings added, in your own private copy. That’s normal, not a bug.
So the honest first-day task is small: enter yourself, your parents, your grandparents, and your aunts, uncles, and cousins if you know them. Use full maiden names for women — always the name at birth, never the married surname — because records are filed under birth names and future-you will be grateful. If you’re not sure of a date, enter your best guess and mark it as approximate. A tree with a few “about 1952” entries is infinitely more useful than a blank one.
The Moment the Tree Fills In — and Why
Somewhere around your grandparents or great-grandparents — for me it was my grandfather’s parents — FamilySearch will do something that feels like magic. You’ll type in a name, the system will say “we found a possible match in the Family Tree,” you’ll confirm it’s the right person, and suddenly four more generations will bloom into view above them. Dozens of ancestors you never typed. Where did they come from?
They came from everyone else. This is the single most important thing to understand about FamilySearch, and the thing most beginners miss entirely: FamilySearch is one shared tree, not your private tree. There is no “my tree” and “your tree” for deceased people — there is one enormous, worldwide Family Tree with one profile per deceased person, and over a billion people in it. When your distant cousin in Ohio spent 2009 researching your shared great-grandfather, his work went into the shared tree, and you inherited it the moment your tree connected to that profile.
FamilySearch isn’t a filing cabinet where you keep your own tree. It’s a potluck dinner — everyone brings what they have, and everyone eats from the same table.
This design is both the magic and the frustration, and it’s worth being honest about both halves. The magic: you stand on the shoulders of thousands of relatives you’ve never met. The frustration: anyone can edit anyone. Somebody can change your great-grandmother’s birth date tomorrow, add a wrong child, or merge her with a different woman of the same name. You will eventually open the tree and find something “wrong” that was right last month. Every experienced user has war stories about this.
The coping mechanisms are simple. First, use the “Watch” feature (the star or bell on a person’s page) for the ancestors you care about most — FamilySearch emails you when their information changes. Second, when you add or correct something, attach your source and write a one-line reason statement (“birth date from 1920 census, attached”). Reason statements are how strangers learn to trust each other’s work, and profiles with good sources get changed far less often. Third, breathe. Changes can be undone, merges can be unmerged, and the “Latest Changes” log on every profile shows exactly who did what. Nothing is truly lost.
“Someone Already Did My Family” — Usually Not True
Now back to the excuse I used for twenty years. When I finally connected to the shared tree, my line did look “done” — four, five, six generations deep in places. It took me about a week to understand what I was actually looking at.
A tree that is full is not the same as a tree that is proven. When I clicked into my own “completed” ancestors, here is what I found: a great-great-grandfather with no sources attached at all — just a name and dates someone typed in decades ago. A couple whose listed marriage date was nine months after their first child’s birth, which either means a scandal or a typo (it was a typo). Two brothers with nearly identical names who had clearly been scrambled together at some point. And one whole family line that ended in 1820 not because the records ran out, but because nobody had ever looked for the man’s parents.
Elder Dale G. Renlund taught that family history and temple work, done together, bring “an increased faith and testimony of the Savior” into our lives — he described it as sealing and healing in his April 2018 general conference talk. I’ve come to think the healing often starts with exactly this: caring enough about real people to check whether what’s written about them is true. When the Lord promised that Elijah would “turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers” (Malachi 4:6), I don’t think He meant turning our hearts toward a list of possibly-wrong names. The turning happens when they become real to us — and they become real through the records.
So when you find your line “already done,” treat it as a draft, not a finished work. The real beginner’s question isn’t “is my family done?” It’s “which of these people have sources, and which are just names somebody believed?” The second group is where your work begins, and there is almost always a second group.
Record Hints: Your Best Friend, With a Warning Label
Once your tree has people in it, FamilySearch starts doing the searching for you. Little brown or blue icons appear next to names — these are Record Hints, the system’s best guess that a record in its giant digital archive (censuses, draft cards, ship manifests, birth registers) belongs to your person. Click one and you get a side-by-side comparison: your tree’s information on the left, the record’s information on the right, and a button that says “Attach.”
This is where beginners get into trouble, because attaching is one click and it feels like winning. It is not winning if it’s the wrong person. My rule, learned from watching a ward consultant untangle a mess: never attach a hint you haven’t actually compared. Open the side-by-side view and interrogate it like a friendly skeptic.
| What to check | Good sign — probably your person | Red flag — slow down |
|---|---|---|
| Name | Exact match, or a known nickname/variant (Bill for William) | Different middle name, or a match that’s “close” in a county full of same-named families |
| Birth year & place | Within a year or two, same state or county | Off by a decade, or a different state entirely |
| Household members | Spouse, children, or parents you already have in your tree appear on the record | A household of strangers — no one you recognize |
| Location of the record | A place your family actually lived in that era | A state your family has no connection to at all |
| Consistency with other sources | Matches what a census or certificate you’ve already attached says | Contradicts an attached record with no explanation |
The household check is the one that has saved me the most times. A John Hansen in the 1900 census is a needle in a haystack of John Hansens — but a John Hansen living with wife Martha and children Alma, Ruth, and baby Clarence, exactly matching the family in my tree? That’s my family. When the hint is right, attaching it is a genuine pleasure: the source links to the person, the facts get documented, and often the record image itself is one click away — the actual page, in a census taker’s handwriting, with your great-grandfather’s name on it.
And when the hint is wrong? There’s a “Not a Match” option. Use it. Marking a hint as not-a-match is real work too — it teaches the system and keeps your tree clean.
Common Beginner Mistakes (I Made or Nearly Made All of These)
Every ward has someone who learned these the hard way. Let me be that someone for you.
Mistake one: trusting an unsourced tree
A name with dates and no source is a rumor, not a fact. Before you build on anyone’s work — before you add their parents, print their chart, or take their name to the temple — click the “Sources” section on their profile. Zero sources means you’re standing on air. This doesn’t make the information false; it makes it unverified. Verify it yourself with one or two records before you extend the line further. Ten minutes of checking beats discovering in three years that you’ve been researching somebody else’s family.
Mistake two: merging too fast
FamilySearch will constantly suggest “possible duplicates” — two profiles that might be the same person. Merging combines them into one. Done right, it’s housekeeping. Done hastily, it’s how great-grandmother ends up with two husbands’ worth of children and a lifespan of 121 years. Before you merge, compare everything: parents, spouses, children, dates, places. If any significant fact conflicts, don’t merge yet. And here’s the mercy: merges can be undone. But untangling a bad merge is the least fun you can have on this website, so go slow.
Mistake three: changing things without a reason
Remember the shared tree: when you edit a date, someone’s email notification goes out. Always add a reason statement when you change or add information, even a short one. “1900 census shows him as born in March, not May” is enough. It respects the cousin who entered the original date, it protects your change from being casually reverted, and — bonus — it forces you to actually know why you’re making the change.
Mistake four: skipping your own story
This one sneaks up on you. You’ll get so absorbed in 1880 that you’ll forget the tree’s easiest source: you. Your grandparents’ memories, your parents’ courtship story, your own life — someday a great-grandchild will open this tree and wish someone had written it down. FamilySearch has a “Memories” section for photos and stories, and adding even one paragraph a month matters. If you’ve ever kept a personal journal, you already have source material that your descendants will treasure more than any census record.
The Small Wins That Hook You
People don’t get addicted to family history because of doctrine charts. They get addicted because of moments. Let me tell you about three of mine from that first week, because some version of them is waiting for you too.
The first was the census. I attached a hint for my great-grandfather — William, it turned out, not Walter — and opened the 1920 census image. There he was, age 31, occupation “farmer,” on a handwritten line between his neighbors. And there, listed in order, were his children: my grandfather, age 6, a name I’d only ever known as an old man, sitting in that column as a little boy. I stared at that line for a long time. That’s the moment family history stops being data.
The second was the draft card. A hint led to his World War I registration card, and at the bottom was his signature — his actual handwriting, in dark pencil, the only trace of his hand I had ever seen. My grandmother was gone by then; nobody in my family alive had ever seen him write his name. I screenshotted it and texted it to my siblings with no explanation, and three of them texted back within minutes.
The third was a photo I didn’t find — it found me. A stranger, some third cousin I’d never heard of, had uploaded a family portrait to my great-grandmother’s Memories page: eight people on a farmhouse porch, probably 1905. I know my great-grandmother’s face from her funeral flowers and one wedding photo. Suddenly there she was at twenty, squinting into the sun, standing next to the brother whose name I had attached a census record to two days earlier. The tree had become a room full of people.
You will have your own versions of these. That’s not sentimentality — it’s just what happens when names turn into faces and dates turn into dinner-table stories. And if you want to share that feeling with your kids, a family home evening built around one ancestor photo and one story works better than any lecture on why family history matters.
Your First Week: A Checklist
If you want to start tonight, here’s the whole path condensed. One small task a day, nothing heroic.
- Day 1 — Create your free account. Ten minutes at the registration page, or sign in with your Church account. Confirm the email. Done — that’s a real start.
- Day 1 — Add yourself and your living family. You, your parents, your grandparents. Full maiden names, best-guess dates marked approximate. Remember: living people are visible only to you.
- Day 2 — Connect to the shared tree. Work backward until FamilySearch offers a “possible match” for a deceased grandparent or great-grandparent. Verify the match carefully (spouse, children, dates), then accept it — and watch the tree fill in above them.
- Day 3 — Audit one “already done” ancestor. Pick someone four or five generations up and open their Sources section. No sources? Congratulations — you’ve found your first real project, and proof that your family is not “done.”
- Day 4 — Evaluate one Record Hint properly. Open the side-by-side, run the checks from the table above, and either attach it with a reason statement or mark it “Not a Match.” Either answer is a win if you actually compared.
- Day 5 — Watch your key people. Click the star on your direct-line ancestors so you get notified when anyone changes their information. Future surprises, handled.
- Day 6 — Upload one memory. One photo or one paragraph of story to someone’s Memories page — or write down one story you know that isn’t recorded anywhere. Start with your own grandparents.
- Day 7 — Tell somebody. Text a sibling the most interesting thing you found. Family history spreads through families exactly this way, and next week you may have a research partner.
What I Know Now That I Didn’t Know That First Night
I started, you’ll remember, just trying to fill in a four-generation chart for my daughter’s activity. I finished that chart in an hour. What I didn’t expect was everything after: that the “finished” family tree was mostly a rough draft; that a free website held my great-grandfather’s signature; that a stranger-cousin was holding a photograph my family had never seen; and that the whole thing would feel less like a hobby and more like introductions.
That, I think, is the real beginner’s secret. Family history isn’t research about dead people. It’s the slow process of discovering that your family is much bigger, much more documented, and much more present than you assumed — and that the promise about hearts turning is not a metaphor. Mine turned over a census page at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday.
Your first step is smaller than you think: an account, your own name, your parents’ names. The tree will do some of the rest. The records will do more. And somewhere in your first week, a handwritten line in an old census will do what it did to me — turn a name into a person, and a person into family. Start tonight. William, not Walter, is waiting to be found.
This article reflects personal experience and study, not an official statement of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. FamilySearch is free and open to everyone; details of its features may change over time — see FamilySearch.org for current information. Sources cited in the text: Malachi 4 (verse 6) and Elder Dale G. Renlund, “Family History and Temple Work: Sealing and Healing,” April 2018, both at ChurchofJesusChrist.org.