✓ If you feel overwhelmed as you start your research, consider taking some beginning genealogy research classes. Figuring out how to organize your research and how to deal with records can be overwhelming if you are just getting started. Consider taking some beginning genealogy virtual courses at Genealogical Studies. The skills you gain will help you better scrutinize data and organize your records.

✓ Start with what you know before you move to the unknown. That's what any good researcher will tell you that when you embark on your genealogy journey. A good way to progress is to pretend you don't know who you are and start with yourself. What does your long-form birth record say and what does your christening or baptism record say? Maybe you forgot that your godfather was your grandfather's brother.

✓ The first resources you should turn to are your living relatives. In my own case, my starting point for research was some very basic information about my grandmother, and a little about my grandfather, provided by a cousin.

If your relatives stare at you blankly or you hear silence on your end of the phone, don't give up on them! As you start to turn up pieces of information, show your relatives what you've found. You'd be amazed at how your show-and-tell could suddenly bring a forgotten memory to the surface.

Showing my 90+ year old aunt some vacation pictures led to an unexpected revelation. I sent her some photos of my husband and me in Kenmare, County Kerry. We were tourists, and considered Kenmare a wonderful place to visit, nothing more. When my aunt saw the pictures, she said, "You do know we have cousins in Kenmare, don't you?" She then told a story about spending a day there with "mother's" relatives when she was a very young woman. She had probably NEVER told anyone those details. I was thus able to hone in on a missing family branch like a guided missile.

Your relatives may not be able to spew out details of names, dates, and places, but when you show them your work they may have a sense of whether or not you are on the right track. When they tell you stories, then your research work is more a matter of verifying that story, which puts you in a much better position. Continue to engage your relatives with what you are doing, and see where it leads.

✓ Moving from the known to the unknown usually means starting with the current generation and working backwards. The more recent the genealogical event you are investigating, the more likely there will be a surviving record accounting for that event. The further back you go, the sparser the records get. So it's critical to build a solid foundation starting from yourself. Your research will never be "done." You are laying the foundation for future research that may be carried on by your children, nieces and nephews.

Believe it or not, a record that survives today may not exist at its origin decades from now. Incompetent and poor handling have destroyed record collections. Catastrophic events have wiped out record archives, and will likely do so again. Do not assume "it can't happen."

Even if you think you are descended from Rollo of Normandy, your job is to start with yourself and create a solid well-researched and well-documented genealogy foundation and work backwards.

✓ Moving from the known to the unknown often means moving from close to home back to Ireland, maybe with an intermediate stop someplace else. If your Irish immigrant ancestor had an unusual name like "Elias Hazlett", or he had an unusual occupation he brought with him to his new home, or he came from a prominent well-documented family, you might get away with a lot of research shortcuts and/or sloppy research. But for most of us the immigrant ancestor was named something like "John Murphy" who was a tenant farmer or labourer and the problem of identifying him becomes incredibly difficult.

Sometimes a number of people from the same place traveled together when they immigrated, and they settled in the same area. There are some well-known Cork based communities in the Irish diaspora. You may need to figure out how John Murphy ended up in your country, where he initially settled, and who he came with. For example, maybe your family knows that John Murphy immigrated with some of his brothers. Investigate the brothers too, in order to give some more tangible definition to the ancestral family. If John arrived with brothers Daniel and Charles, you might be able to determine their birth order in Ireland, a piece of information that could help you distinguish their ancestral Murphy family from other Murphy families. I am aware of one case in which three brothers immigrated together and settled in Pennsylvania. Luckily for the descendant of one, they married before leaving Ireland, leaving their footprints in the Irish records.

✓ Every time you obtain a new piece of information, record its metadata. Do NOT rely on that record to remain online forever, download it immediately. You need to record WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, maybe WHY. Take notes on what record set or collection you got that information from, the repository holding that record set, any relevant volume, book, page or image number, where that repository in turn got that record set, and the date you retrieved the information. This will save you much grief, wailing and teeth-nashing later when that record set disappears from your favorite repository due to "contractual obligations" or other annoying circumstances.

If you use Family Search, note that the website automatically provides you a citation when you pull up a record. Copy and paste that citation into your notes.

Some records that were formerly freely available online have now gone behind pay to view firewalls. Don't let that happen to you.

See prior comments about the destruction of records.

✓ Become active in the genealogical and historical societies relevant to your family history. Their local volunteers might have compiled biographies or obituaries or other record collections you won't find at the major genealogy record websites such as Ancestry.com, Family Search, or Find My Past. Local societies may have experts about Cork Irish settlement in the community. Some county and city libraries have a genealogy help desk which also holds locally created resources.

✓ Expect to meet genealogy data abusers and misusers in cyberspace and see FAKE family trees. If you find a family tree possibly relevant to your ancestry, it is up to you to verify its accuracy. It doesn't matter how many people are in the tree or how pretty the photographs are. Quality information and first-hand accounts matter more than quantity and weak conclusions.

Back in the Dark Ages before family trees and genealogy records were on the Internet, people had to have SOME idea of the origins of their Irish ancestors before enduring 12 - 24 hour flights to try to research on Irish ground. These researchers tried looking through whatever available records they were given permission to look at. Access to parish registers varied depending on the mood and resources of the pertinent clergymen and what records survived. Some priests and vicars were family history enthusiasts and were happy to let visitors look at the old parish books. Other priests and vicars were not nearly so accommodating.

This gave researchers a severely limited and inconsistent context within which to work. What we would consider a "reasonably exhaustive" search today would have been impossible back then. Nevertheless, our research forebears constructed family trees with the information they were able to acquire. Some of those trees eventually got published on the Internet. Missing from those family trees are the questions, doubts, concerns, and reservations those earlier researchers may have had about their findings. Like a virus, erroneous family trees got propagated around. Few people have bothered to go back and recheck those trees for their accuracy based on all the information we have at our fingertips now. So the spread of fake family trees is not always deliberate, intentional, and not necessarily due to badly done research. Our job as family researchers is to verify the family history data we have before us. A falsehood repeated a dozen times does not make it the truth, even if it shows up in a Thruline. Our own research is poorly done if we do not check up on that earlier research.

If you share some of YOUR research online (and I hope you do), people will use, abuse, and misuse it. They will fail to give you credit. You cannot get consumed by anger when that happens, and you cannot allow your research to be waylaid. Ignore those without research integrity, keep your nose to the grindstone and continue working on your research.

Of course it is not ALL bad. Publishing your family research online may get REAL relatives to contact you, and one or two of them will turn out to be gems. Remember my story about how photos of my trip to Kenmare inspired my aunt to recall what she remembered about a missing family branch? Well, a man from that missing family branch contacted me because he saw my research online. He lived in Ireland, not far from Kenmare. He took a graphic of our family tree to a map printer, then surprised his siblings one Christmas with a giant printout of the family history they had been wanting for decades. That man is deceased now, but I do stay in touch with his widow.

Family trees linked to raw DNA results (see DNA testing, next point) are often experimental in nature, with ancestor and cousin guesses attached to them. Sometimes the owner of a tree attaches on a DNA match as a relative to see what the matching engine in the website will do with it. Maybe the website automatically does the attachment or comes up with a possible ancestor. Websites that use DNA evidence to link your family tree to that of somebody else are following scientific evidence of a relationship, which is not the same as following the genealogical proof standard. The link is likely a theoretical ancestor or ancestors that are identified by the weight of the claims in the pool of family trees at the same website. Just because 10 trees claim such ancestors does not mean they are correct. What the website is doing is making a suggestion, not providing proof. It's still your job to stick to conventional genealogy research methods and prove a link.

✓ Consider incorporating DNA testing into your research. Conventional genealogy research is necessary, but it will probably not reveal certain unexpected paternity events that got conveniently covered up. DNA can provide a clue that not all is at it seems on paper. Or, DNA can simply be used to validate and provide further proof for your research. Conventional genealogy research and genetic genealogy testing used together can be exceptionally powerful.

There is much more on this subject on the DNA page.

✓ Even when you follow good research practices, your research could still contain errors. This is why what you write ABOUT your research becomes as important as the research itself. Remember the earlier comments about family trees from the Dark Ages republished on the Internet?

We get dazzled by by the finished product - the family tree. Missing is the thought process that went into it. Are you concerned that you don't have baptism or birth records for your great-great grandfather and his siblings, and you've had to estimate birth years from death and census records? You should be writing about how their parish records did not survive. You are not able to perform a "reasonably exhaustive" search if the records you need don't exist! Or maybe there ARE records available and you SHOULD be able to find your great-great grandfather's baptism in that record set, but you can't. A problem like that should headline your written narrative.

We may not be able to produce a 100% accurate family tree, but we can leave enough information behind about the research so that those who follow us will understand our unfinished business.