I am obsessed with wanting to know who my ancestors are. When I asked my parents what our ancestral background was, they’d respond with a vague, “Oh, you know, English and Irish, I think.”

My husband and I had just moved back to Australia after a stint in London, and the bug to find out more about my ancestors had really bitten. I’d watched Who do you think you are? and had seen advertisements for Ancestry.com, so I knew my search for family details should be easier than ever.

I logged onto Ancestry.com.au and signed up for a free trial*. After creating my account, I entered information about myself, then details of my parents, and my grandparents. I entered as much information as I knew about them, such as full name, the date and location of births, marriages and deaths, and where they lived. Woah! I started having second thoughts. I recalled that a security question often asked online is the maiden name of your mother. Is adding my parents’ information online a good idea?

I found the Ancestry.com.au Privacy button, which provided some reassurance. Only the details of deceased people (or people over the age of 100) are made public. And I also had the option to make my tree publicly or privately available, or private and not searchable. I had control over how much I shared. Reassured, I added in as much information as I knew.

As I completed each person’s profile, little green leaves appeared in the top right-hand corner of the records I added. Each green leaf offers a hint that new, potentially relevant, information about the individual is available.

Hints are found based on the combination of information entered about an individual (name, location, date of birth, death or marriage; and name of spouse or children). These data are automatically cross-referenced with Ancestry.com’s vast databases of public Family Trees and access to Census Records and Birth, marriage and death records.

To see the hints, I clicked on the individual with the green leaf, then Profile, then finally on the Hint tab. The hints listed information sources such as publicly available trees, that often included new information about the person I was researching. They also include links to other records. I now discovered new family members (living and dead) and my tree branched out.

Like any healthy tree, mine sprouted in all directions. I added in family members from the maternal and paternal sides of my father and mother. Then, I found information about my four sets of grandparents’ maternal and paternal sides (although information on my father’s maternal side came to a fairly abrupt halt). So, you get the idea that I became swamped with a tsunami of information. I originally ignored information about siblings as I became overwhelmed—preferring instead to focus only on my direct ancestors—but I soon discovered that a much richer trove of knowledge of my direct ancestors became available to me through descendants of my ancestors’ siblings.

Getting to this point devoured hours of my time, but I only had a one-dimensional view of my family tree. Whilst, I had many names of people I never knew existed, and some minor details such as the dates of their birth and death, a three-dimensional picture of who these people were and how they lived eluded me.

I needed to narrow my focus, so devoted my attention to my father’s paternal line. I want to state at this point that I place an equal value on my father and mother’s family. For example, my 5x Great-Grandfather whose surname I wasn’t born with holds an equally precious position in my family tree as does the 5x Great-Grandfather whose surname I shared. But I had to start somewhere.

Next time, I share the discovery of my paternal family line, which takes me to Ireland.

*To ensure that everyone receives only one trial, a payment method is required to initiate a free trial. A small pre-authorisation charge will appear (and disappear) during the trial to verify the card information. For more information about free trials, see Ancestry® Free Trial.