A family tree grows from what you already know. Begin with yourself and work backwards, one generation at a time, and treat everything you have not yet checked as a guess.
Start with what you have
Write down yourself, your parents, and their parents, with full names, birth and death years and places where you know them. Add the names of siblings. Ask older relatives to fill gaps and correct you. Record who told you each fact, since stories drift.
Find documents
Birth, marriage and death certificates, census returns, church registers, wills and old family papers are the usual backbone. Move from known to unknown: prove each parent from a document before adding their parents. Names are repeated within families, so check dates and places before deciding that two people are the same person.
Keep it tidy
- Write dates in one format and keep the year as the minimum.
- Record each person once, and link rather than copy.
- Mark uncertain facts as uncertain, in the notes.
- Take care with living people. Keep their details out of anything you share.
Using Kinage for it
The tree builder keeps a small tree on your device and works out how any two people on it are related, which is a handy way to check you have linked people correctly. It is a sketchpad for relationships, not a full genealogy database. When your tree outgrows it, export a file and move it: GEDCOM explained shows how. Read keeping a tree private before you share anything.