Normally, the first couple generations are pretty easily documented. Off the top of my head, I know my parent’s names and birth information, also my grandparents, and all of my siblings. Pushing up the tree through Grandma’s family and Grandpa’s family, first on Dad’s side and then on Mom’s…gets a bit trickier. Still, you have a general idea of where they lived, who their siblings were..etc. Let me introduce the next important tool…the United States Census records. Available in 10 year increments dating back to the 1700s, these records can provide an outline of a person’s life – where they lived, what their occupation was, when they immigrated to the US. You will find these records on many genealogy sites, Family Search, Ancestry.com, Legacy…sometimes you can search for free, sometimes you need to pay for a subscription to use the database. These records have been digitized…making the search so much easier than microfilm. You can search based on the name and birthdate of your ancestor – without identifying the location ahead of the search. Meaning that odd cousin Joe who moved from Minnesota to California on a whim, will still be found (if he answered the census taker’s questions that year). The US census is available to the public up to 1950. It is released after 70 years…so we will get access to 1960 in 2030. There are census records in other countries, of course. Some of these records are also available on the research sites.