Learning about your dead relatives begins with the living. “Start with yourself and work backward,” says Matthew Helm, coauthor of Genealogy Online for Dummies (Wiley, $25, www.amazon.com). Recording your own life details (birth, schools, jobs) and identifying the documents that prove them (birth certificate, diplomas, tax forms) helps you create a list of basic biographical questions for family members. Or ask if anyone has a family Bible, suggests Barbara Vines Little, president of the National Genealogical Society. “Bibles were traditionally given to newlyweds and inscribed with records of previous births, marriages, and deaths,” she says. For public records, the U.S. GenWeb Project (www.usgenweb.org) gives links to research sites broken down by state and family name. Talk to the staff at the Family History Library, which has 4,000 branches and houses the world’s largest collection of microfilm records (www.familysearch.org). Just don’t expect to finish your search anytime soon, Helm says: “There’s always someone else to find.”