Seriously, I began researching my family history about seventeen years ago, right after my oldest son was born.  We were living in South Texas at the time, and many of my ancestors had lived in that area, too, making research very easy.  I started out just looking for information on my father's family, then as I gathered more and more info, decided to try to follow every branch back to the immigrant ancestor.  I have discovered that most of my family has been in the United States for well over 200 years, making it rather difficult to reach my goal.  But the more challenging, the more fun!

UPDATE

SOFTWARE

I am not going to take up a lot of space here providing information on what I have learned, but I do want to make a few comments about genealogy software. While all genealogy programs are basically glorified databases, not all are created equal. The first software program I ever used is still my favorite, but unfortunately they only make it for Macintosh computers now. So, if you have a Mac, I highly recommend Reunion! I haven't used it in probably 12 years, so am not aware of what changes/upgrades they have made, but if it's similar to what it was then, it is wonderful.

The software I used for my research before the fire was Family Tree Maker, and I have a Genealogy Home Page you can visit and view some of my research.  I have a few neat old family photos there (and am hoping to add some new ones soon), along with GEDCOM files.  (GEDCOM stands for Genealogical Exchange Data COMmunication)

However, since the fire gave me an excuse to buy new software, I started really researching other options. I never cared for Family Tree Maker's interface, because you couldn't see all of the children at the same time if there were more than three or four children in a family.

RootsMagic is the program I finally choose, and I am very pleased with my choice! It has a very user friendly interface, and doesn't take much time at all to figure out how to use. I especially love that it automatically capitalizes all surnames and gives you the age of a person at any given event in their life (i.e.: baptism, marriage, etc.). RootsMagic has a very easy-to-use "web page creator", which I've not yet had time to play with (or you would find a link to mine on this page!) But it looks very professional.

LINKS

Below are some links to some genealogy sites on the web that I have found to be very helpful.

Ancestry.com  and RootsWeb have recently merged, and become the mother of all genealogy sites.  For a subscription, you can access some wonderful records on Ancestry.com, such as Census Records, the Social Security Death Index, various military records and so on. If they don't have an actual image of a document, there are links and information on where to get a copy of it. One of the most helpful things I've found on RootsWeb are the Surname Message Boards/Email Lists. I have found a lot of helpful information and met some great folks this way. My GEDCOM files are there, too.  I've gotten lots of correspondence from my listing there.

Brooks Family Genealogy Page  This is our own genealogy site. (I mentioned it earlier, but thought I'd plug it again!)  It looks pretty simple, but it took years of work to gather all the info on this page.   If you want to know how far back I've gotten, or see some really neat old family photos, this is where it's at.

Cindi's List  This is THE site for genealogy on the web.  She has literally tens of thousands of links to useful genealogy sites.  If you can't find it on Cindi's List, then it ain't there!  If you're not sure where to start doing internet genealogy research, check out her site.  It'll get you moving in the right direction.

Family Search  This one is brought to us courtesy of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, and is pretty self-explanatory.  You enter information, and it does a search for you.  The LDS church is known for their genealogical records, which have been an excellent source of help to me over the years.