Genealogy and family history

Searchers often arrive through phrases like genealogy, family history, ancestry research, or trace my family. This page is a practical overview of how to research without drowning in tabs, how to protect living kin, and how Dorot fits as a private build-and-share surface rather than a public records marketplace.

Genealogy vs family tree

A family tree is the structured chart: people, partnerships, and children arranged across generations. Genealogy is the research discipline behind that chart—comparing evidence, resolving conflicts, and deciding when a claim is “good enough” to enter.

You can sketch a tree from oral history alone. Genealogy asks for sources: civil registration, church books, census schedules, immigration files, military rolls, obituaries, letters, and DNA as supporting clue rather than sole proof. Family history then narrates what the dates meant: migrations, occupations, languages, and the households that held together after loss.

Dorot focuses on the tree workspace. Use it to capture conclusions cleanly. Keep a separate research log for citations if you need archival rigor. For builder mechanics and online tree intent, see Build a family tree online.

A durable research workflow

Start with the known living

Interview parents, grandparents, and older cousins before chasing eighteenth-century gaps. Living memory decays faster than you expect. Ask for full names, maiden names, place names as they were said at the time, and approximate years tied to events (“after the war,” “before we moved”). Record uncertainty honestly.

Work one identity at a time

Genealogy collapses when three people with the same name get merged. Build each person as a distinct identity first. Attach partnerships only when two people are linked by marriage, co-parenting, or durable partnership evidence. Put children on the correct union so half-siblings remain visible later.

Places are evidence too

A birth country, region, and city are not decoration. They constrain which archives to search and often explain why a surname spelling shifted. Dorot stores structured place fields and resolves locations through our partners so migration patterns appear as geography, not as footnotes you never revisit.

Resolve conflicts without erasing

When two death years disagree, keep the conflict in notes until a stronger source wins. Do not silently invent a compromise date. Future researchers—often your own descendants—need to see why a choice was made.

Widen carefully

After the trunk is stable, add collateral lines: siblings of ancestors, married-in partners, and cousins who hold photos or documents. Filters for blood vs married-in and living vs deceased keep a dense tree readable while you expand.

Sources that usually matter most

• Civil birth, marriage, and death registrations for vital dates and parentage claims.
• Census and population schedules for household composition and approximate ages.
• Immigration, naturalization, and passenger lists for origin places and original spellings.
• Military service and pension files for identity anchors and next of kin.
• Obituaries, cemetery records, and memorial pages—useful, but often secondary and occasionally wrong.
• Family Bibles, letters, and oral histories—high value for soft facts and places, variable for exact dates.

DNA matching can suggest unknown cousins or confirm a hypothesis. Treat matches as leads that still need documentary triangulation, especially before adding living people to a shared tree.

Privacy for living relatives

Genealogy increasingly includes people who are alive. Ethical research means minimizing harm. Prefer private collaboration over public profiles for living generations. Ask before publishing photographs, medical notes, or stories someone considers private. Invite-only access is the default posture Dorot supports: cloud save and invites require a verified email, and invite tokens are not meant for search indexes.

Practical rules that travel well across tools:

• Do not post exact addresses of living people on public trees.
• Be cautious with details about minors, adoptions still sensitive in the family, and active disputes.
• Prefer roles (viewer vs editor) so not every relative can rewrite the trunk.
• Honor removal requests for living individuals when legally and socially reasonable.

Collaboration without chaos

Family history is rarely a solo sport for long. One person starts; five others hold missing maiden names. The failure mode is parallel spreadsheets that never reconcile. A shared tree with clear ownership and roles reduces that drift.

On Dorot, an owner can invite editors or viewers after save. Live updates follow a last-write-wins model for the linked cloud tree, so agree on who owns controversial merges. Export JSON backups before large imports so you can recover if a collaboration experiment goes sideways.

Places, migration, and identity

Borders move. Spellings change. A village name in an elder's memory may not match a modern map label. Capture what was said, then normalize country against a stable list when possible. Dorot flags cases where birth country still needs review so place cleanup becomes a visible checklist instead of invisible debt.

Mapping generations turns abstract kinship into routes: a great- grandfather's birth country, a grandmother's migration, a generation clustered in one coastal city. That spatial story is often what brings reluctant relatives into the project.

How Dorot helps without pretending to be a records giant

Large ancestry platforms excel at searchable indexes and user-submitted public trees. Dorot does something narrower and more controllable:

• Local-first drafting in the browser before any upload.
• Union-aware kinship so remarriage and half-siblings stay legible.
• Places and map for birth and death geography.
• Verified-email save and invites for private collaboration.
• JSON backup and CSV people import paths for working copies you control.

Use specialist archives for documents. Use Dorot to maintain the chart that your household actually trusts. Product internals, data model, and “what Dorot is not” live on How Dorot works.

A first-month genealogy plan

1. Interview two elders. Capture names, places, and approximate dates with sources like “oral — May 2026.”
2. Enter the trunk in Dorot: you, parents, grandparents, and their unions.
3. Confirm three vital events with documents you can obtain quickly (recent deaths, known marriages, your own records).
4. Clean places until birth countries are explicit and map markers look sane.
5. Export a backup. Save with a verified email. Invite one careful relative as editor or viewer.
6. Only then chase the oldest brick walls—one person at a time.

Common genealogy pitfalls

• Copying an entire online pedigree because the names look familiar.
• Merging same-named people in the same village without distinguishing evidence.
• Ignoring married-in relatives who hold the photos and stories you need.
• Publishing living generations publicly “for cousin bait.”
• Letting the chart rot because the research log and the tree live in disconnected tools with no export habit.

Where to go next

If your primary goal is building and sharing the chart, start with the family tree guide and open Dorot. If you need the precise product model— people, unions, invites, backups—read How it works. Genealogy rewards patience; a clean private tree keeps that patience from scattering.