The holidays are harvest time for family genealogists. By necessity, they must take advantage of relatives gathered for good food and gift swapping, and get them talking about family history. So, if you missed the chance to mingle with relatives on Thanksgiving, you’ll get another chance very soon when Christmas rolls around.

While many people enjoy talking about their ancestors lives, others simply refuse to reveal family information. Whether they fear skeletons in the closet, or feel its disrespectful to speak of the dead, nobody really knows. Hopefully, your relatives will be more on the chatty side, and give you enough to go on.

Before you approach relatives about family genealogy, get organized. Be prepared by locating some of the many forms to be found for free on the internet. You’ll need a pedigree chart and family group sheets to get you started. If all goes well, by the time the holidays are over, you’ll have filled in the names of your grandparents, and great-grandparents, and information about where they were born, married, and died, so that you can pick up their trail with further research. You might also want to record a few interviews with a tape recorder or video camera, if relatives are willing.

When it’s time to start your research, your options include ordering birth, death and marriage certificates, searching for ancestors on the census, and many more. With so much information now available right at your fingertips on the internet, it’s a good place to start. You likely won’t want to start buying access to database websites until you’ve gathered a little more information. In that case, searching message boards and posting queries is a good way to go. Maybe you’ll get lucky and find a distant cousin who’s already gathered family information that will help you.

Whatever path you take down the genealogy road, remember one very important thing, and that is to note every source of information about your ancestors, no matter how obscure. One reason for this is that you will likely want to revisit that information, and if you don’t know where you found it, you might not locate it again, and lose a possible clue.