How do I fill in my heritage back to Ireland and Denmark

Question

Looking to fill in heritage back to Ireland and Denmark.

Comments

Hi Kerri, and welcome!  Just work your way back, adding one ancestor at a time, starting with your parents.  Provide source citations for facts like dates and places of birth, death, marriage, etc.  As Bob said, ask specific questions here at G2G and we'll be happy to help you out.

Answer 1

Like all those who are new to genealogy, you have to start at the beginning. You add in yourself, you dont need sources for yourself.

Then you add your parents. Personal knowledge is sufficient for sources if they are still living. A death record is a good source if they have passed.

Then comes your grandparents for which you should try to find death records and any other records that may be available online, if they have passed. If you live in the USA, then the US census records if they were alive in 1940 and 1930 and earlier, are very useful sources.

Also try and add in siblings and spouses for each generations - except your own since living people are unlisted on Wikitree. But if there are any siblings and spouses (Aunts and uncles) and cousins who have passed, then you may add them to the tree.

By the time you get back to your great grandparents, hopefully one of your great grandparents will already be on Wikitree which will make it much easier to make a connection to the global tree.

Danish records are online and some of them are even available in both Danish and English.

Irish records are kind of hit and miss.

Answer 2

Hopefully you've had family members that have saved pictures and individuals that you could lean on as family historians.   This can go a long way towards filling in the last 100 years or so of your family heritage.  Another way, and by far the most rapid way to answer genealogy questions is to subscribe to a site that has search capabilities, (Ancestry, Family Search, MyHeritage, etc) to ask questions.  This will cost some money, but is well worth it in the long run for saving time.   Other possibilities are using the G2G feature of WikiTree and asking specific questions.   Most of our genealogists are happy to point you in the right direction.   Yet other possibilities include the local library reference collections, your local LDS library, and FultonHistory.com, (it's free to use, but the learning curve for searching is a bit steep- read the instruction pages before you waste a lot of time.

     The National Library of Ireland has hundreds of years of Catholic Church records which are not indexed in that venue, but if you can get by the Latin and the cursive, I've found a great deal of aha moments there.

Comments

Family Search is free.