By Melanie Marsh, AG^®

Your curiosity has been gnawing at you for a while, and you’ve decided to start looking for more information about your great-grandparents. Or maybe you’ve decided to pursue professional accreditation. Today. Not tomorrow. You sit down at your computer and sign in to FamilySearch, Ancestry, or your chosen family tree software or platform… and you stop, staring, trying to decide if the blank spaces are taunting or beckoning you.

Perhaps your online tree has a few generations, or maybe many. Either way, you realize there is a lot more to discover. Each empty branch of that tree is beckoning you, all at once, and you may feel the overwhelm starting. Reframe it.

Ask the right question

Our efforts will be most meaningful if we ask questions. The first one is often, “But where do I start?” Alone, that question is hard to answer. Instead, let it lead to answerable, focused questions about one person at a time. These questions become our research goals. If you are a goal-setter, you know that setting clear, realistic goals means you have a better chance of achieving them. It’s the same in genealogy. The clearer the goal, the more likely you’ll reach it!

Saying, “I want to know about my great-grandparents” is good, but it’s so broad you’ll almost certainly find yourself either paralyzed with overwhelm or wandering with every wind of a hint that comes along. Focused questions are specific goals or objectives, clear enough to prevent the overwhelm and the wandering that inevitably come with overly broad or undefined goals.¹

A solid, answerable research question is clear, focused, and narrow. Consider the difference between “I want to know about my great-grandparents,” and “When and where did my great-grandparents, William and Henrietta Blair, get married?”

Both are good. Both center on one couple. The difference: one could be all-encompassing, the other is focused on one event and relationship.

A better question

Start with the second question–refine it. Add details from any clues you have for when and where they were married. Do you know when their first child was born? Do you know where they lived when that child was born? If you know, for example, they had a daughter named Dorothy who was born in Cass County, Illinois in 1918, use the date and place of her birth as clues in your question to start your search for marriage records to answer your research question.

Here’s an example of what I mean:

William Otis Blair and Henrietta Muncy lived in Cass County, Illinois when their daughter Dorothy was born on 15 February 1918. When and where did William and Henrietta marry?

Your Turn

Try writing a few research questions yourself. Look at the information you have, whether it’s already in your online tree or in the documents you’ve collected. What do you want to know? Make it specific. Add a relationship, a date, and a place. Write clearly. Refine it as needed.

Answering one question gives you part of the story, and raises many more questions to answer. Questions about their lives, the context of their life experiences, what they might have read in the newspapers, how their crops grew or their business did that year, and so on.

Crafting a good research question is the first step in building a solid foundation for successful research.

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¹ Research questions, research goals, research objectives, research problems, and similar are all terms for this same concept: start with what you know, then decide what you want to know next.

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Read the original post at MarshGenealogy.

Watch for the next post in the Foundations series.