📘 The Most Common Mistakes in Creating a Family Tree

1. You Don’t Verify Information

Family stories are a great source of information, but they are often distorted over time. Treat them only as a guide and with some skepticism. Always try to verify the important information you obtain in available documents or directly in parish registers. Try to confirm each piece of data or information with at least two independent sources.

Always double-check a parish record — verify the parents of the person in the birth record and, for example, in the marriage record. The parents and place of birth must match. If they don’t, it may not be the same person, so try to find another source that confirms the information. Remember that the priest who wrote the entry was also just human and could make mistakes.

Read this point at least twice, because it is absolutely crucial when building a family tree.

A story from real life: One unnamed genealogist researched the wrong family line for several decades. He eventually discovered that he actually belonged to a completely different family — all because at the very beginning he failed to verify the records properly and confused two people with the same first and last name from the same village, thus focusing his research on the wrong lineage.

2. You Don’t Record Your Sources

Always write down each piece of information together with the source from which you obtained it (e.g., a birth certificate, a conversation with your grandmother, etc.). This will save you a lot of time when you need to verify something later. Months or years from now, you won’t have to rack your brain trying to remember where you originally found a particular detail.

Approach your research in a scientific way and back everything up with the source from which the information comes. Those who may one day take over your work need to know where you obtained each piece of information.

3. You Rely Only on Online Sources

For every parish record, make sure to note the description of the parish book, the archive, the designation and book number, the page (pag/folio), and the URL of the link where you found the record (unless it’s a living register and you are researching online).

Don’t forget to also take a screenshot (you can use the “Print Screen” key on your keyboard or the “Snipping Tool” in Windows) or, in the case of living registers, a photo or scan.

Archival web services occasionally undergo updates, and URLs may change over time. This has already happened several times in Czech archives when they switched to a new information system. Thanks to the description of the parish book, however, you will still be able to locate the record in the new system, even if the original link changes.

4. You Don’t Back Up Your Data

Losing months or years of work due to a disk failure is every genealogist’s nightmare. Always back up your data in at least two independent locations — your computer, an external drive or flash drive, or cloud services (Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.).

Once you start using genealogy software, regularly export GEDCOM files and back them up again in at least two different places. Not only will you have a backup of your data, but thanks to GEDCOM you can also transfer it between different programs and, of course, create a family tree with us in just a few clicks.

5. You Rely Only on Memory

If you ever say to yourself, “I’ll definitely remember this,” trust me — you won’t. Take notes even about things that seem obvious now and you’re sure you won’t forget. Everything can serve as a clue in the future, when you may hit what feels like a dead end and don’t know how to continue. Going back through your notes, comparing them side by side, might suddenly reveal a connection that moves your research forward.

As information piles up and becomes more and more overwhelming, relying only on your memory is foolish. Our brains have an amazing ability to forget things, so don’t forget that. :)

6. You Copy Data from Other People’s Family Trees

Various online services (e.g., MyHeritage) offer the option to search for matches between your family tree and someone else’s. They may suggest adding dozens of ancestors to your tree at once. However, these can be — and often are — nonsense. For example, when a mother supposedly had a child before she herself was even born.

Never copy these people directly; instead, jot them down on paper or save them as a note on your computer and treat them only as leads that you must first verify yourself (by finding the appropriate parish record) before adding such a person to your family tree. But never add people en masse from other family trees, otherwise you risk creating a mess in your own that will be difficult to fix later.

This is a very common mistake, so be consistent and don’t give in to the temptation to automatically add people from other family trees.

7. You Chase Too Many Rabbits at Once

And in the end, you catch none. That’s why you should define the scope of your research from the very beginning. It’s better to start with the paternal line from a chosen ancestor and focus fully on that before moving on to others. Or set a goal to create an ancestry chart for just four generations. Then add more generations gradually, once you’ve completed those first four.

This is a good way not to get completely lost in the research itself. It can easily happen that you jump from one person to another and suddenly don’t even know what or whom you are actually looking for, and it all becomes overwhelming.

Set your priorities and a smaller, achievable goal right at the start, and only after reaching it add another or move on to a different branch.

8. You Record Names in Only One Form

In the past, names and surnames were often written differently depending on the language used at the time (Jan vs. Johann, Jiří vs. Georg, etc.). Therefore, always record not only the first name in its modern form (transcription) but also the literal transcription (transliteration) of the record from the time period it originates from. Otherwise, you may get lost in your research. One time you might find the birth record of Jan Novák and another time the wedding of Johann Nowak. You’ll be racking your brain wondering when Johann was born or Jan got married, when in fact it could be the very same person.

9. You Don’t Have a System for Organizing Files

Create your own system and stick to it. Make folders for each branch separately — for example, by your grandparents’ surnames — and inside them create different folders where you’ll save and organize the information you find. In each folder, you can have subfolders such as “Documents,” “Photographs,” “Parish Records,” “Notes,” and keep everything organized within them.

For parish records, also choose a consistent way of naming the files. What worked well for us is using the format:
Year_Event_Surname_FirstName–Father–Mother–Register-Page.jpg

For example:
\FamilyTree\Novak\Parish_Records\1858_B_Novak_Jan–Jiri_Novak–Alzbeta_Dvorakova-Prague_Liben-64.jpg

The ideal system doesn’t exist — everyone prefers something different. So take this only as inspiration for how we do it, and find your own method of organizing and storing files. But don’t treat it too dogmatically — over time you’ll change and adjust it several times anyway.

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