Ascending is not the word. It's too encompassing. Genealogy work requires an ongoing alertness to details, a compulsion to probe, CSI style, to uncover often one-word details. It's an exercise that can be given proper time and attention in retirement only. By this time, a good many reliable sources of family information have passed on. Therefore, it's urgent to do the following immediately:
1. Gather all paper documents pertaining to my parents (records, letters, documents, etc.) from family members. For this I would begin with my mother (closest living relative) and fan out to aunts and uncles.
2. Talk with key relatives about family information and begin recording family history. I began this with my mother a couple years ago and have since become lax about it. I remember being impressed with the number of skeltons in the closet and thinking there was enough drama for a fictionalized version of my own family's story. Also, I remember hearing comments from a couple of my more analytical cousins at a family funeral about their eagerness to initiate a genealogy search.
3. All this would reveal names and dates and to keep it all together I would print out a free genealogy chart and begin inserting all the gathered details.
A very time-consuming process, but the minimum that must be done at this stage!
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