Family History and Genealogy : Home

"First Generation students with greater family history knowledge tend to have a strong degree of resilience."

This guide has been created to help students explore their family history. Pages contain useful articles for getting started, including information about public records, interviewing family members, and using photos to open up doors into the past. The websites tab includes a useful list of free sites (some might require you to register with a free account - don't use sites that ask you to pay fees for resources); these sites will help you search for any historical documents pertaining to your family tree.

Family History Research is about "people" so the best place to start is with your immediate family members. Ask your parents or guardians about your family background. You probably already know many relatives, or at least know something about their lives, but you will be surprised how many big details (and interesting smaller details too) are left untold because people don't always feel that their life story is interesting or important to others. Learning about your family history will put you on a fascinating journey.

The more you learn from personal interviews of family members and relatives, the easier (and more interesting) will be the library and internet research (using quality websites about genealogy or cultural or history topics). It will be helpful to think throughout your findings, how did I get here, and how does my family background make me who I am?

Some of the family history sites listed on the "Useful Websites" page have charts that can help you fill in a "Family Tree" using boxes or tables. This can be helpful to organize the names in proper order or alignment, which will help you visualize you Family History much better. You can also simply Google "Family Tree" and find other diagrams to print or download.

On this page, we have listed some sites that can help you get started interviewing relatives, with suggestions for ice-breakers and general questions to ask that can lead to important, fun, and interesting parts of your family story.