How to Build Your Family Tree

How do I go about documenting and building a family tree to learn about my family's lineage?  Genealogist Jon Smith will share the basic process for beginning and continuing the construction of a family tree to trace your family's heritage, lineage, and origin.  In addition to walking you through the process, Jon will provide handouts of the more common sources of information, plus a listing of free and paid software programs commonly used in genealogical research.

Jon Smith is an Instructor of Genealogy at Howard Community College, the Education Chair for the Howard County Genealogy Society, and a frequent lecturer for genealogical groups.  His ancestors were early settlers of Colonial America including Jamestown, Plymouth, and the Norris family in St. Mary's, Maryland.  His family settled in western North Carolina in the late 1700's and remained, which caused many interesting overlaps as cousins married cousins.  He works in an on-line group with several of his family members in a combined tree, now exceeding 500,000 family members.