As your family tree grows, you'll often find that you're missing important family information. For example, you may want to know your grandmother's birthday, or your great-great grandfather's name. You could even be searching for the name of the country from which your ancestors immigrated many years ago. Or, perhaps you're only looking for the names of your ancestor's living descendants -- those long lost cousins who must somehow be related to you.

Almost all of this information is available to you if you go to the correct place to look for it. And, to make things even easier, there's usually more than one place to find everything that you are looking for. You just have to choose the best and easiest route for you.

That's what this section of the "How-To" Guide helps you to do. It tells you what sources, such as census records, contain the information you are looking for and what you need to do to obtain those sources. As you use this section, there are just a few things that you need to remember:

When you click on an item, such as "Birth date," in the Step-by-Step Guide, you will be provided with a list of sources where you can find that information.

The sources that the Step-by-Step Guide recommends are listed from most useful to least useful. You will find the information you are looking for more quickly and more easily if you use the sources listed toward the top.

To use each source that the Step-by-Step Guide recommends, you need to know a certain minimum amount of information.

If you don't have the minimum amount of information required to use the recommended source, the Step-by-Step Guide can help you find it. Eventually, you will be able to locate the record containing the information you need.

To return to the main screen of the Step-by-Step guide, click here.

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