Eppersons Family Research

Plain-language guides for tracing an American family line

Plain-language guides for tracing an American family line

Record Coverage Checklist

Pick one ancestor you are stuck on and answer honestly. The score shows how thoroughly you have covered the standard U.S. record groups for that person — and where the gaps are. Most research dead ends are really coverage gaps.

This is a study aid for organizing genealogical research, not professional genealogical, legal, or citizenship advice. A checklist score says nothing about what the records will actually contain; it only measures whether you have looked.

This site exists for one reason: to help people trace an American family line without getting lost. It began as a place for people researching the Epperson surname, but everything here applies to any family name — the records are the same, the methods are the same, and the mistakes are the same.

Genealogy in the United States runs on a fairly small set of record groups: federal censuses, county vital records, immigration and naturalization files, land records, and whatever your relatives kept in a shoebox. Learn what each group can and cannot tell you, work through them in a sensible order, and write down where every fact came from. That is most of the craft.

The guides here each answer one concrete question — how to find an ancestor in the census, how to request an old death certificate, how to check whether an ancestor received federal land — and point you to the official repositories that actually hold the records, like the National Archives.

Start with the Record Coverage Checklist, a short self-assessment that scores how thoroughly you have searched the basic record groups for one ancestor. It is the fastest way to see what you have skipped. Most "brick walls" turn out to be a record group nobody checked. Then read How do I start a family tree? and work outward from there.