You start at home. Interview all of your relatives. Begin with your immediate family, your parents, your siblings and their children. Extend outwards to your parents, siblings and their children, and backwards to your grandparents and their siblings and children. Work backwards as many generations as possible. Obtain birth, marriage, and death certificates, and any other medical record that you can find. The same techniques that genealogists employ can be used to research the family medical history.

Construct a Pedigree Chart. The chart should show squares for males and circles for females, all connected by lines showing marriage and descent. An open circle or square indicates a normal female or male, free of the disease. A filled-in (blackened) circle or square is an affected male or female. A diagonal line through a circle or square indicates that the individual is deceased. In addition to birth, marriage, and death data, put in any relevant medical information that you have found, either from an interview or from documentation. Health items should include chronic ailments, as well as the age of onset and types of major illnesses or surgery. If an individual is deceased, obtain the death certificate so that you can record the cause of death.

While genealogists assembling their pedigrees tend to concentrate in "going as far back as possible", tracing their line back to great and multiple great-grandparents, the genealogist interested in family medical history must be careful to extend outwardly as well, recording all of the collateral relatives, including all siblings and their descendents.

• The Family Health and Heredity Committee
• How Do I Start?
• What Can I Learn?
• Where Can I Learn More?
• Sample Pedigree Chart
• Committees