To make specific connections between people, you need to fix them in a specific place. Each individual needs a name, a date, a relationship and a place.

When professional genealogists start a research project, we start out by asking a question structured like the following:

• Where and when was John Smith (name) born, who died in Tulsa, Oklahoma (place) in 1979 (datewho was the father of Jane Smith, and who were his parents?

If you ask me for help, the first thing I will do is help you structure a question like this for your family. If you work on your own, you will still benefit from setting up a research question this way. You may have dozens of questions–that’s okay, just write them all down this way and tackle one at a time.

If you want to make progress on a research direction, you have to know where some event occurred in the person’s life. Records were created in places, and even in this age of digitization, records are organized and stored according to the jurisdiction which covered a location at the time of the event.

If you only have one place to start with, ideally it would be a death, because then that gives you the resources of the cemetery information from Find a Grave or Billion Graves, and gives you a place to start looking for a death certificate. A good death certificate might have birthdate, birthplace and parents of the deceased, so it’s like gold to find one.

Once you have an idea where to look, read up about that place–when did birth, marriage and death records begin to be collected in this place? Are they available on line? Which website holds them? Or do you have to write to request the records? Don’t know this for all 50 states? That’s okay, neither do the professionals. We use research guides. Try theses for starters:

• The National Genealogical Society has a series of research guides to purchase for about half the US states here, with more to come.
• Family Tree Magazine has basic facts for free on their website, for example, facts about the 50 US states here, or Germany, or England, with more details in research guides to purchase.
• FamilySearch has a research guide page for almost every locality you can think of, at no cost, on its Research Wiki page.

Always be consistent with place names: either Town, County, State, Country, or Country, State, County, Town. Remember to write down the location using the name it had at the time of the event.

The more records you can find which mention your ancestor in a specific place, the more easily you can distinguish your ancestor from other people of the same name, this avoiding the biggest single problem in constructing trees, that of getting the wrong John Smith into your line.

So be precise about places: federal census, state census, city directories, draft records, birth and death records, tax records, probate records, and so on keep giving clues about place. Pay attention.