How to build a family tree on a computer: step by step

From the beginning, you will not need the Internet, because you will be looking for a search directly in the family. It is often a great excuse to start talking more again, how to find common ground and re-establish family relationships. And even where the thread broke long ago. Older relatives just ask what they remember about their family, take notes, write down interesting things.

Then look for all possible family documents – birth certificates, marriage or death certificates, parties or wedding announcements and other things that will help you bring family history closer.

For example, from the birth certificates of your parents and grandparents, you will learn not only about them, but also about your great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers – in these older documents you will also find out the occupations of your ancestors, of course places of birth, and grandmothers and great-grandmothers names for single.

Copy all obtained documents. You’ll do even better by scanning and saving them electronically. Get copies of old photos.

But gathering information is just one page of building a family tree. Now is the time to properly archive, sort all the data obtained, and most importantly build your own family tree. Fortunately, today there are a number of computer programs that will make your work easier. Here you can easily create a graphically rendered family tree. You will start with yourself and you will continue to branch the tree with more and more ancestral records.

In addition to Internet programs, it is also possible to download offline programs directly to your computer. From the offline options, try Ancestry or Pedigree Pro 2.1, the online versions are, for example, Family Tree Builder or Geni (all have the option of choosing the Czech language).

Both variants have their advantages and disadvantages. Online versions allow you to link your family tree with a family tree that is already being compiled somewhere in the world by someone else with whom you have a common ancestor. However, this advantage is at the cost of putting the information in the hands of your ISP. If you only work in an offline program, the risk of misusing sensitive data about your family is significantly lower.

When you reach non-living relatives in your family search and there is no one to ask, don’t despair. Start with even more interesting, almost detective work. You can start searching in the register books (ie books of births, marriages and deaths), which are freely available on the Internet. These are actually real old scanned books that they once kept in individual parishes. On the Genealogy website, under the Digitization tab, you will find the website of the corresponding archive, depending on the place of residence of your or rather your ancestors.

For the protection of personal data, you can only search in the so-called non-living registry books – this means that for example the last entry in the birth book must be older than one hundred years, in the marriage book it is more than 75 years, as well as the 75-year protection period in the death book.

Live registries are not publicly accessible and are stored at registry offices. They are registry books from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. Only authorized persons can view them. For example, those who are recorded in the book or people who prove to be their direct relatives.

So when you look at the period where inanimate matrices begin, it may seem that now it will go like clockwork. However, when breaking old records, you often sweat at the computer.

In the past, book entries were made by hand. It was written in a different script than we are used to today, the so-called kurent. In addition, each recorder had his own writing style. To make it even more complicated, some entries can be written in German and further into history in Latin.

To help you read the transcripts, you can search the Internet for a comparison of the current font with Kurent. There are also websites that will overwrite your search word with kurent. You can then search for books by this form.

If you are patient and you are lucky that your thread is not broken, you have a chance to reach the ancestors of the sixteenth century. At that time, the first registry records began to be kept in our territory.