Talk with anyone who has done the slightest bit of genealogy research and most all will tell to start with what you already know and work backwards from there.  Essentially, start with yourself, then your parents, grand parents and on back.  It helps to use a family pedigree chart to document your work.  The chart also provides a nice visual representation for reference purposes.  You can download pedigree charts from many different websites or you can use what we have provided here.  The charts can be saved to your computer (download only) by doing a right click and selecting “Save link as” (Windows) or “Save target as” (Mac).  Both can be edited to meet your needs.

Pedigree Chart (PDF) – Provided as a courtesy by About Genealogy

Pedigree Chart (Word) – A five generation pedigree chart.