| How Sheila Used the 5-Step Research Process |
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| Step 1: Write down what you know. |
Sheila knew information about her parents, brothers, sisters, grandparents and other relatives. She also remembered as a little girl, in her native China, seeing a book with a red cover that her father had shown her. He claimed the book held the family's Tseng genealogy. |
| Step 2: Decide what you want to learn. |
Sheila determined that she was going to find the compiled record of her family's genealogy. |
| Step 3: Choose a source of information. |
She returned to her native China to find the red covered book that contained the Tseng family genealogy. She asked her brother to visit the village that their grandfather came from to talk to people who might remember the book. Her brother wrote to her that a distant cousin in a nearby village had a set of nine ancient books that contained the records. |
| Step 4: Learn from the source. |
After her brother photocopied and sent all nine books to Sheila, over a two year period, she was finally able to review what she found. Sheila discovered that the record contained 172 generations of thousands of names with detailed dates and places going back to 1950 B.C. |
| Step 5: Use what you learned. |
Sheila and her brother slowly transferred a copy of the records out of China so that Sheila could preserve and share them with others. |
