Kinship Control: How to Trace Your Ancestry and Make a Family Tree

Tracing your ancestry and creating a family tree is a fun, fascinating, educational and bonding experience. Almost all of us have those colorful family stories, passed down through the generations, about being descended from a great leader or a Native American tribe or some other person of distinction but the actual truth can be pretty surprising. Remember when it was revealed that President Obama is former VP, Dick Cheney’s distant cousin?

A 2007 Ancestry.com survey found that, «Although America is known as a nation of immigrants, 27 percent don’t know where their family lived before they came to America.» In a 2014 study by 23andMe,  Katarzyna Bryc, a population geneticist at 23andMe, reported, «The average African-American genome, for example, is 73.2% African, 24% European, and 0.8% Native American, the team reports online today in The American Journal of Human Genetics. Latinos, meanwhile, carry an average of 18% Native American ancestry, 65.1% European ancestry (mostly from the Iberian Peninsula), and 6.2% African ancestry.» Spellbound yet?

Ask your relatives to start a family tree

The best way to start your family tree is by asking your parents, grandparents and great-grandparents (if possible) for old family photos and documents. Conducting interviews with your relatives is another fantastic way to get info about your roots. If you’re not sure where to start, MyInterview is an app that lets you record, make notes and create a questionnaire. Ask about family names, places of origin, immigration stories, etc. If you really want to go deep, take an online class at Family Tree University.

Once you’ve got some clues, there are lots of sites that make your search a million times easier with databases of public records, newspapers, Census data, etc. The top three are Ancestry.com, MyHeritage and Find My Past. Doesn’t everyone secretly want to get their DNA tested to find out what their true heritage is? Ancestry.com and MyHeritage both offer DNA testing. For a more detailed report that includes health info too, go to 23andMe.

The creativity

Of course, what good is roots research without a tree to map it out? RootsMagic and TreeView let you create an easy-to-update mobile family tree. Now you can really have fun by transforming your tree into a showpiece. Kids Family Tree has a downloadable form for the little ones and Martha Stewart has several gorgeous projects for moms. So get out there and start digging up your past!

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