Sorry to be late in the advise department.

As said previously:

1.) Start with yourself and work back one step at a time and get documentation for every event.

2.) The most popular software is Family Tree Maker. It works on Winows. Mac, and Linux.

3.) Use the "trees" on Ancestry.com, familysearch.org, etc. for GUIDANCE ONLY. They will help you find direction, but be sure to document by original sources each "fact". The LDS accepts whatever has been submitted, and many are full of serious errors. Examples are children born to a female four years after her death, children born within seven months of each other, and children born before the mother was eight years old. In early times a person may have gone through two or three spouses. Sometimes a child is credited to a father that was dead over twenty years. (Long before sperm banks).

4.) Ancestry's Census records and other source documents are quite helpful, and best when you are pursuing an uncommon name.

5.) Your friendly local library is the next stop. Many will have a section for genealogy that will contain published Vital Records, and local community histories with a genealogy section in the book, as well as published family genealogies. If you are on track for a Mayflower ancestor, many libraries have the Mayflower "Silver" books covering five or more generations of descendants from the original passengers. If you are on track for someone who served in the colonial, revolutionary wars, or the conflict amongst the states, there are numerous military records that have been published that may include some family data. While you are at the library, you should see if they have subscriptions to Ancestry.com, Heritage Quest, or NEHGS. The pay side of Ancestry has a lot more data than the stuff that is available for free. Heritage Quest is a site loaded with many genealogy and history books that have been digitized, and master indexed. NEHGS is The New England Historic Genealogy Society. Its website is loaded with digital images of many documents for New England research as well as family works and manuscripts from around the United States and Canada. All of the Massachusetts Vital Records before 1915 are digitized and online.

Should the local library not have these resources available the librarian will generally be able to direct you to a library in your region that can help. For specific books, most libraries can obtain them for you on inter-library loan.

Should you hop across the pond to Scotland, Scotlandspeople.gov.uk is the official site for Vital Records. One warning is that you should have a very good idea of where and when before searching, as you can use up a tenner rather quickly.

Good luck and happy hunting,

Steve Brown,
Research Genealogist
The Scottish Genealogy Society
Edinburgh.