hr100

I find genealogy is really good for problem solving and keeping your brain active. Obviously totally different but I have chronic depression and it's helped me a lot as it takes a lot of thought and problem solving

Ancestry.com is the easiest place to start.

Biggest piece of advice - take anything anyone else has uploaded IE their family tree with a pinch of salt. People just guess at stuff and then other people presume the previois person must have got it right etc. They don't think that maybe there is a lot of John Smith's born in a large city in the same year.

I do use other people's trees as a guide at the start and then you just learn as you go along starting with finding people's birth, marriage and death records and census records.

Sometimes it can take me a week or so to find one person census record because the people who originally took the census wrote things down wrong or its transcribed wrong. There is ways round like checking at the last address you knew them at. I find it exciting when I find a missing record or someone who I am stuck on and then I find who they married etc.

Someone else mentioned the Mormans. I'm an atheist but they are useful, they believe they should save their ancestors so do a lot of family research. They also have a lot of money so for 50 years or so they have been scanning millions of documents around the world. They provide access for free at www.familysearch.com but it's not the easiest site to start with.

Any questions feel free to DM me.

I understand.

3 years not working after burnout spiralled into depression and also an ADHD diagnosis.

I feel very stuck about how to move forward

Yeah totally bonkers but useful as they have spent 50 years archiving records around the world and they make as many as they can free and without any sort of religious pressure.

I went to a genealogy conference run by them and they had one small stall about their religion in this huge conference place so there really isnt even a need to read or hear anything religious