Writing a Biography

Now that you have a Family Search account and are a little more familiar with the platform we can start learning and discovering our relatives and finding out more about who they were.

The best way I have found to both learn and teach family history is to try writing a biography of one of your ancestors. This helps you know what to search for and keeps you on track if needed. I've created a Family Biography Outline that you can use in both a Word Document and as a PDF. Just a quick reminder, make sure you write down your sources (I forgot to put this on my outline).

When choosing a person to write a biography about I would recommend choosing somebody who was born around 1830 or younger. The reason behind this is because you will find the records and sources start having more information in them and they will give you better leads for your research.

First, log in to Family Search and find a family member you would like to research or learn more about. To do this go to the Tree tab in the upper left-hand corner. If you look at the screenshot you'll see what it looks like. Number 1 is how you can zoom in or out. Pushing the arrow at 2 will expand your tree. I prefer looking at the Fan Chart. To do this click on 3 and select Fan Chart.

I like the fan chart because it shows you more generations at once so you can choose the ancestor you want to research a little easier. You can choose how many generations back you can see at once by clicking on one of the numbers on the right of Generations. It also shows you their birth and death dates (if there's room).

Go ahead and look through the names, click on their names and information, look to see who has sources and who doesn't. If somebody doesn't have many sources attached they might be good ones to research.

Once you've chosen somebody to write a biography on, print out the outline and start filling it out. If you can't find some of the information that's ok. We'll learn how to research and read sources later.