This past week, a friend from Marshalltown came down for a visit and we enjoyed the day having lunch, catching up on local news and showing off our our fair city. This friend had mentioned on arriving and telling a couple of interesting and funny family stories, that this person might get into genealogy.
Thinking about that statement and knowing what a big task it can be tracing family and so forth, I began to wonder what advice you would give to someone starting out. Besides, my standard saying with writing personal and family related stories is always as follows. How do you eat the elephant? One bite a time. Also, knowing that when I started writing several years ago and wanted to bring family members to life with stories, the best person to begin with was myself.
That same afternoon, I was up-town Williamsburg and was cleaning the windows for the Iowa County Historical Society. After I was done, I asked Rita, the Director there, what her advice would be to someone wanting to get started in genealogy.To my pleasant surprise, her answer was the same. Start with yourself and work back. She also mentioned that she has always been more interested in events that have happened here rather than trying to do much tracing to Europe.
Just remember! By the time you write stories about the past and a great niece or great-gran-daughter is interested some day, probably 50-100 years will have past. A relative of yours will think that the 1990's were oh so long ago!
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