Free family tree templates

Here are six quick tips to getting your genealogy research right:

• Assume nothing! Just because a woman is a man's wife doesn't mean she is his children's mother; check their birth records. Just because you've only known your surname spelled one way doesn't mean people with variant spellings are not related to you; surname spellings have become consistent in the last 100 years. Just because a gravestone say Great Grandma Hannah died in 1898 aged 68 doesn't mean she was born in 1830; check the birth records for up to ten years before that date.
• Do your own research. The Internet is heavily populated with family trees that have been copied, often many times, from a sloppily researched or even deliberately misleading original. It's tempting to grab a 'ready made' tree or branch of a tree and attach it to a seemingly matching piece of your own ancestral heritage, but if you don't double-check every bit of the research, you could end up taking your own genealogy research in the wrong direction. What's the point of that?
• Don't follow conventional naming patterns religiously. While they existed in Ireland and many other societies, few families always, always followed them. They can be a clue worth following up, but make sure you find the evidence before recording it as certain.
• Check your maths before you start filling in dates on your family tree templates. A woman who married your 3 x great-grandfather in 1812 should not be recorded with an estimated date of birth in 1805 just because her 1841 census says she was 36.
• Get rid of the notion that all your ancestors were saintly and never told a lie. Vanity is not a modern phenomenon. It's been around for centuries. So has the pleasure of 'getting one over on the authorities'. Not everything noted in an official document will necessarily have been honestly recorded. There is also the possibility that there was some other influence at play when someone told an untruth. In many cases, they won't even have been providing misleading information intentionally. Age was less of an issue than it is now and many people didn't know exactly when they were born so they simply estimated. Bear in mind also that freedom of speech and religious practice are relatively modern notions. Your ancestors may well have lied about their true religious persuasion to avoid arrest, eviction or social exclusion.
• Remember, while you still can, that your memory is fallible. Sooner than you expect you will forget who gave you that nugget of information about Great Aunt Nellie who became a nurse overseas. There will come a day when you want to start tracing her life but don't know where to start nor the name of your original source. Note down everything. Get accustomed to taking a photocopy or transcribing the title page of each and every book or document that yields information about an ancestor. If you train yourself to carefully record your all your sources, you will avoid having to duplicate your own efforts and will also allow others to evaluate the trustworthiness of your genealogy research.