Starting Your Family Tree

West Virginia Genealogy

The first thing you should do is find your oldest living relative and start with them.

Record the name, birthplace and name, death place and name of everyone they can remember. Try for legal names and maiden names as "Mrs. Jones" and "Doc Jones" won't appear on census records or birth certificates. Also, ask if they have any scrapbooks or photo albums. You'd be amazed at what older people will cut out of the newspaper or tuck into a photo album but you'll be thanking them when you find an obituary or two that gives you four or five names or when you discover a long lost photo of a great-great grandmother!

The next thing you need to do is get organized! There are several programs available such as Family Tree Maker or Roots Magic. I highly suggest purchasing one of these before your paper trail gets too long. Once you start, you'll understand!

Now it's time to start looking for vital records, census records, etc. There are several options available:

West Virginia Division of Culture and History
This is a fantastic ongoing project - you can search for death, marriage and birth records. While it is an extensive database it is still somewhat limited.

Doddridge County Roots
The Gaston family has done an amazing job of compiling their database. It's been an ongoing project for this family for about 20 years and it shows. Many thanks to them!

Ancestry.com
Ancestry.com is by far the most robust and useful site I've found. You do have to pay for a membership but you have access to census records, military records, social security death index and much more. You can also build and store your family tree using their utility.

These are just a few of my favorite sites for finding my West Virginia ancestors. There are tons of other sites out there pertaining to genealogy and if you just do a Google search you'll find plenty of them!

Tip: familiarize yourself with "wildcard searches" as it gives you more flexibility when searching. For example: when looking for a record for one of my ancestors with the name "Dooley", I used the wildcard search as "Doo*" and I was able to find it. The name was input as "Dooly" therefore didn't come up on the original search. This technique can be used on both the West Virginia Division of Culture and History site as well as Ancestry.com.