If you want to piece together your own family's past, this site contains a wealth of useful tools and tips. You can also work through helpful guided examples of piecing the past together from multiple sources.

• Look through the History Toolkit where you will find concrete, practical advice for starting your own research project, creating a timeline, conducting oral histories, and for working with deeds, probate records, diaries, gravestones, and other sorts of primary records.

• You can learn how to extract stories from Martha Ballard's diary in the Doing History section of the site, where you will cross-reference and compare dozens of other sources from the period with information in the diary. Follow in the footsteps of a Pulitzer Prize winning historian! Your relatives may not be in this diary, but the skills you learn here will help you figure out the stories in your own family's history.

• See also the bibliographies and links to other Web sites for resources beyond this site.