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Researching Your Family History

So, you’d like to begin researching your family history but have no idea where to begin? You may have heard you can ‘do it all on-line these days’ but still wouldn’t know where to begin? This article might be for you!

Please note that some of the information here is specific to researching in the England, methods for other countries will vary in places.

• Thinking About the Process
• Beginning Your Research
• Getting Started, Living Memory
• First Interlude, A Word of Warning
• Second Interlude, Being Organised
• Recent History, 1901 to the Present
• Certificates
• 1837-1901
• Using Censuses
• Before 1837

Thinking About the Process

What Do I need?

First and foremost you will need patience! Researching family history is by no means a quick process—expect to spend years rather than months doing it if you want to get quite far.

Having said that, you only need to go back as far as you like; there’s nothing to say you have to take every line all the way back to the 18th century if you don’t want to! However, it does become quite addictive once you start.

At some point you will get stuck and it pays not to get annoyed at that point. Sometimes you can come back to a ‘brick wall’ as it is often called some time later and make a breakthrough that wasn’t previously possible.

You also need some reasoning skills. Much of family history is revealed as a puzzle and it can take some thought in order to put together the pieces. In this regard having someone to help you with your research, such as a relative who shares an interest in the family may help.

What Will it Cost?

Your research will cost you, but less than you might think. Hiring a professional genealogist to do your research would cost thousands, I suspect you wouldn’t be reading this if that was the route you’d opted for!

If you want to use the Internet to help you, which I highly recommend (we will see why in due course), you will probably need to spend around £80/year on an Ancestry membership.

When you order certificates these will cost you £7.50 each (subject to change). How much this costs overall will depend on how completist you want to be, but expect to order at least birth and marriage certificates for all primary people in the tree.

By the time you have researched back to your 3x great grand parents that’s 31 people, or around £350.

Any other cost is really optional, and may come from computer software, travel costs from visiting places relevant to your research, maps, books and so on.

Expectations

Before you begin it may benefit you to throw away any pre-conceptions that you have about family history. The two things that people normally ask if they find out you are researching is ‘Have you found anybody famous?’ and ‘Have you found any money?’.

The answer to these questions for most people will be ‘No!’, however, this is missing the point entirely!

It doesn’t matter if the only people you find are penniless farm hands, they are your penniless farm hands and you will love them for it. It is nothing to do with money or fame!

If you are lucky enough to come across these things then think upon them as happy chance, but do not dwell on them.

Beginning Your Research

There are four different areas, or periods in time, that you will need to consider in chronological order to grow your family tree:

1. Living Memory
2. Recent History, 1901 to the Present
3. 1837-1901
4. Before 1837

These areas overlap and the dates are not exact as we shall see. Different resources are available for each period and so each period requires a different approach.

Let us now consider each of these periods in time in turn.

Getting Started, Living Memory

What Do You Already Know?

To begin your research you should start with yourself! Take a piece of paper and draw out as much of your family tree as you possibly can. For each person try to remember the following:

• full name including middle names and titles
• date and place of birth
• occupation
• date and place of marriage
• date, place and cause of death

If you can, make a note separately of the following information as well:

• addresses or areas each person lived in
• where they worked and when
• details of any military service
• rumours or stories you may know

For any information you don’t know, write a question mark so that you can see the information is missing.

Most people should be able to write down at least three generations from memory, i.e. back to your grandparents. Some people may also know the names of their great grandparents, but most people will not be able to go back farther than that.

Interviewing Family

Once you have written down all that you can on your own it’s interview time! Now, there are areas of your family history that you could research at any time, and there are some that you should do as soon as possible.

You should interview as many family members as you can, while you still can. Elderly grandparents, great aunts and uncles and so on will not be around forever and once they’re gone they will take with them much of your family history, which may be lost forever.

See if you can get your family together for a chat about family history; the more older family members the better. If some of them don’t like each other then arrange more than one get together! You should video tape these interviews if possible, or if not at the very least tape record them.

Remember that the video or tape that you create will become a historical document in itself.

When interviewing your family you have two main goals. Firstly, you need to get them to dig out any paperwork they have that may be relevant to your research. The things you are most interested in are birth, marriage and death certificates. Most people are loathed to throw these away and will have at least a few tucked away somewhere safe.

After that try to get hold of any other important documents such as wills, old passports, military papers, newspaper clippings or anything at all that may come in useful. Some relatives may be happy to hand over these documents into your keeping, but if not ask politely to borrow them, make good quality photocopies and then return them.

In the same notion this is a good time to get hold of photographs and most importantly to accurately identify the people in them. Many people have photographs of relatives but don’t know who they are—it’s very important to ask elderly relatives to identify as many people as they can in photographs while they are able to stop these people’s identities being lost forever.

Try to obtain, if you can, a clear photograph of each primary person in your tree back to your great grandparents; beyond that you may struggle. Again, ask to borrow the photographs, assuring that you’ll be careful with them, and make high quality digital scans (rather than photocopies) of the photos if possible.

Obviously photos will only go back so far, but as you begin your research you will find that the history you unravel comes alive so much more if you can put a face to each name.

Your second goal is to gather as much family history as possible. Genealogy is the raw data of your tree—who fathered who, who married who and so on. Family history is the whys and wherefores of the tree—why did people move from one area to another? What sort of people were they? How did people meet?

Genealogy is more easily researched than family history. Once you can no longer be told the reasons for things you have to guess or decipher them, which is harder and not as accurate. Try to gain as much family history as you can from relatives and fill in the genealogy later.

Take along the tree that you started and flesh it out as much as possible using additional names that your family know. Then work through the tree discussing each person or couple, asking for memories, stories and information. You will find that most people begin to tell tales that you have never heard before, which is why it is a good idea to record the process so that you don’t miss anything.

This is a good time to get any old skeletons out of the closet and give them a good airing as well! You may be able to prove or disprove any old family myths once you begin your research.

First Interlude, A Word of Warning

At this point I feel it’s only fair to mention the elephant in the corner…

As soon as you move beyond living people, you are researching a paper trail, not a DNA sample.

As much as you may not want to consider it, the people named on the censuses and certificates may not be who they claim to be. It only takes one slack-knickered mill girl who wrote the wrong father down on a birth certificate to invalidate all of the research leading back from that point!

The further forward in time this happens, the more research is invalidated. The further back you get with your research, the less likely it is that you’re looking, in genetic terms, at the right people.

The odds are going to be down to the moral fibre of your ancestors, their honesty and a bit of luck. Many times mistakes will have been made quite innocently.

Unfortunately, there really is nothing that can be done about this. Just bear in mind as you go along that you’re playing the game; you can never really, truly say that a person you have found is your great, great, great whoever.

Second Interlude, Being Organised

OK, so hopefully by this point you’ve drawn your own tree and then fleshed it out with any information you could gather from family members. You might even have some certificates and other bits and pieces of information. Where is it? In a pile? In a folder or an envelope?

Researching family history generates a lot of paperwork, and it pays to be organised from day one! When I took over the research that my Mum had done it was all in a big plastic box in no particular order with lots of notes written in random pads and on scraps of paper—you just can’t research seriously in that way!

It’s not hard to be organised, it just pays to keep up to it! There are two aspects to this, firstly your physical paperwork and secondly your computerised data (if you take this route).

Organising Paperwork

In terms of the paperwork I have everything in lever arch files, with the papers in clear plastic wallets. The people in the files are arranged alphabetically, and each person has a piece of paper as a title sheet (see image below) which begins their section.

Behind the title sheet I then file any certificates I have for that person, followed by any additional information, followed by all the census returns in chronological order. For any data that concerns more than one person, e.g. families on a census or marriage certificates, I file these with the husband or head of household where possible.

This may sound obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people don’t manage even a simple system like that and just have everything stuffed into a box!

It’s also a good idea to have one good quality notebook for scribbling information in, A5 size is good as it’s small enough to carry about but big enough to make diagrams in.

If you find information is if no use then strike it out in the book, similarly tick information you find to be true. This way you won’t read back over old information and wonder why you wrote it down!

Using Your Computer

The second part of being organised it to put all your data into a computer program. This isn’t something that everybody will want to do, but I highly recommend it and I think it’s almost essential if you’re going to be doing a lot of research.

By entering your data into a program you can, amongst other things:

• Generate family trees or tree sections in a variety of styles to print out
• Generate summary pages or data sheets for people
• Sanity check your data automatically (e.g. highlight improbable ages for marriages, births etc.)
• Export data for use on websites or in other programs (GEDCOM)
• Create websites from your data
• Add photographs to your data

The first two points are the most important. It will help you to organise your data much more easily if you can print out neat people sheets, trees and tree segments to put in your files.

There are various programs available for you to buy. I am a Mac user and I use Reunion, many PC users use Family Tree Maker which is now owned by Ancestry. There are other programs available but most perform the same sorts of features, certainly from a Mac point of view I am very happy with Reunion.

Recent History, 1901 to the Present

Now that you have exhausted your own knowledge and your family’s, it’s time to do some actual research! It’s at this point that most people would not know clearly how to proceed without learning about genealogy.

There is a basic process of research and re-enforcement that takes place, which slowly allows you to work backwards in time.

The aspect of re-enforcing data is a very important one. Once you move away from writing down what you and your family already know, you will be moving into paper based research. Each piece of information that you discover should be re-enforced, or verified by as many other pieces of information as possible.

For example if a person was born in a particular place according to their birth certificate, is that the same place they say they were born on the census? Does the age from a marriage certificate match up to the birth year from a birth certificate? Do the parents’ names from a birth certificate match up to the census? And so on.

If you notice any discrepancies stop and try to work them out before going any further back in time, otherwise you may find you have been researching the wrong people!

This process of discovering parents and working backwards is a fairly obvious one, the only real difference is the data available to you in each time period and how it is used.

The latest census that we can view is from 1901, so to research after 1901 we primarily have to use certificates. These skills are still used for researching before 1901 as well, but we use the censuses as well where available.

To work backwards using only certificates (which are discussed below), given a person A, you ideally need to obtain their birth certificate. This will reveal, amongst other things, the names of A’s parents B and C. You next need to obtain the marriage certificate of B and C, which will reveal the names of the fathers of B and C who are D and E. Once you know the name of the father, you obtain the birth certificates of B and C using the names as re-enforcement data. These will give you the mothers of B and C who are F and G. You can then repeat the process again, obtaining the marriage certificates of D and F, and E and G.

At all points you would double check the birth dates on the certificates to make sure they match, check that the names of parents match between the birth and marriage certificates and so on.

Certificates

There are three types of certificates that you may obtain, which are birth, marriage and death certificates (often abbreviated to ‘BMD’). Each contains different information but all can be very useful.

You should obtain at least birth and marriage certificates for all primary people in your tree, even those at the bottom such as your parents and grandparents if you do not already have them.

Ordering Certificates

Ordering a certificate is a two part process. Firstly you must find the person that you require, and secondly you must order the certificate from the relevant place.

There are several ways to find the person that you require, the most common of which is to find an entry in the St. Catherine’s Index (pictured below). You can access this list in paper based form in many large, central libraries, or much more easily on-line with an Ancestry subscription.

The index lists births, marriages and deaths chronologically by quarter, and alphabetically by name, for the whole of England. Also listed is the district in which the event was registered. Along side each entry in the index is a reference number, e.g. 9d34.

Whilst later index pages are neatly typed, earlier ones are hand written and can be very difficult to read in places!

Compare a page from the index in 1845 on the left to one from 1945 in the image below, note also that in later years the mother’s maiden name is also included:

When looking up marriage certificates be sure to look up both the bride and groom in the index under their own names, and check that the reference number is the same for both people.

If you do not know the exact date of an event, which will usually be the case, you must search through the quarters until you find the correct entry. Usually you will have an idea to within a couple of years of when the event occurred, so you might have to search 12 or 16 quarters.

It’s best to search in a radial fashion, so if you think an event happened in 1875, search 1875, 1876, 1874, 1877, 1873 and so on.

The alternative to using the St. Catherine’s Index is to use a website which has already indexed BMD information for a particular region, such as Yorkshire BMD.

Once you have found the person you need to obtain the certificate, and there are two different ways to do this. Firstly, you can take the reference number from the St. Catherine’s Index and use this to order the certificate from the General Register Office either on-line or by post.

Ordering from the GRO will get you a facsimile copy of the original certificate, so for older certificates this may make them harder for you to read as the handwriting will be cursive and the copy may not be clear.

However, many purist genealogists prefer this type of certificate as it ensures that you receive the original data and there are no transcription errors. Also, if your ancestors were able to write then you will see their original signatures on the certificates in their own hand (as can be seen with Thomas Wharton above).

Secondly you can order the certificate from the relevant registrar’s office, usually by finding their address and writing to them (enclosing a cheque), but you can also visit in person. If you do this the St. Catherine’s Index reference will be of no use to them at all, they will only require the year, quarter, name and district.

Ordering from a registrar’s office will get you a new, hand written copy containing the data from the original certificate.

The downside of this as mentioned previously is that the process is technically open to transcription errors and interpretation, and any original handwriting samples from your ancestors will be lost.

Also, finding the correct registrar’s office to write to isn’t always easy! Some larger cities have multiple offices and for smaller areas the office is often miles away. You will need to search on Google or a site like GENUKI to help you with this.

Whether you order from the GRO or a registrar, you should include qualifying information with your order. This will enable the person who deals with your order to check the certificate matches your data, and if it does not they will return your cheque and write to you to say the person did not match. As a general rule you should include at least the expected father’s name when ordering birth certificates for example.

Birth Certificates

Birth certificates (such as the one pictured above) contain the following information:

• Registration District
• Date and place of birth
• Date of registration
• Name of child
• Name of father
• Name of mother (including maiden name)
• Occupation of father
• Signature, address and relation of informant

Sometimes you will find that a birth certificate has a blank space for the name of the father—this indicates an illegitimate child! It could mean that the mother and father were not married, or that the father was unknown.

It’s a shame when this happens because it can completely cut off one of the lines of your research!

Marriage Certificates

Marriage certificates (also pictured above) contain the following information:

• Date and place of marriage
• Name, age, occupation, address and condition of the bride and groom
• Names and occupations of bride and groom’s fathers
• Signatures of witnesses

Death Certificates

You are far less likely to order death certificates than birth and marriage certificates, however they can still be useful. Where people have died younger than expected you will be able to find out the cause, and there will often be the name and address of one of the people’s children who registered the death.

If you are interested in trying to find the graves of any of your ancestors the death certificate, revealing where they were living when they died, will give a good indication of the area to look in.

Death certificates contain the following information:

• Date, place and cause of death
• Age of the person
• Date and place of registration
• Name, address and relation of informant

You might find it useful to Google the cause of death if it’s not immediately obvious to you what it means. Usually a fully medical term is used e.g. ‘Phthisis’ which is more commonly called TB.

On very old certificates you may even see nonsensical causes such as ‘Decline’ or ‘Act of God’. Remember that the 19th century was a time of great advances in medicine and the difference between the earlier and latter parts of the century in terms of medical knowledge is vast.

1837-1901

In this third period from 1837-1901 we use certificates in the same way as previously discussed, however we can now also use the censuses at the same time. Often it is easiest to discover people on the census first, and then confirm the information using certificates.

Because people used to be much less geographically mobile, you can often find the same family in the same house on many successive censuses (see image below).

This makes it quite easy to quickly work backwards in time and discover a lot of information which you know to be correct, having qualified the information from the later census (for example using the place of birth from a birth certificate).

Using Censuses

History of the Census

The census is a gold mine of information and along with certificates is absolutely the most important resource that you can use. The census as we know it today began in 1841 and is taken every 10 years, however the information is not made public for 100 years in order to protect the identities of the living.

Censuses were taken from 1801–1831, however they were more like simple head counts; they did not include personal details of the population and as such as not of direct use to family historians.

The 1841 census is also quite basic compared to later censuses, lacking both an exact age (ages of people over 15 were rounded to the nearest 5 years, although some enumerators ignored this direction and recorded exact ages) and having only limited information on place of birth.

The 1851 and later censuses addressed these issues and added even more data such as more accurate occupations and details on whether people were employed, or whether they owned their own business.

All census data is organised by county and region. Each region is then broken down into a number of enumeration districts depending on the size of the place in question.

All of the censuses currently available are hand written and can be difficult to read! Several distinct styles of writing were used in the 19th century and whilst some are beautifully clear others are almost illegible (the image above being an example of the former). You will improve your palaeographic skills as you gain more experience with the censuses!

In addition to this the census pages as we can view them today were transcribed from forms which were distributed to each household. During the process of transcribing and checking the data many marks were made on the final pages, so you will often see that comments, strike marks and alterations can obscure some of the text.

Each census provides a wealth of useful information. As well as the genealogical information such as parentage, ages and places of birth you can begin to gather more family history with occupations and addresses.

Addresses are useful as they allow you to see where your ancestors lived and in what sort of areas and houses. If you’re lucky you may find that the houses still exist and you can go and have a look at them, which can be an interesting thing to do!

The occupations allow you to imagine what life was like for your ancestors. In many cases you will also be able to track a persons career over the years using census data, for example seeing a boy trapping in the mine become a hewer and then possibly rising into management as a pit overman or deputy.

You should try to find each primary person in the tree on every single census if possible. You never know what additional information may be available in a particular year which may help you!

As you order certificates you should also re-enforce census data with data from the certificates, checking where possible that ages, occupations and addresses match up or are acceptably close.

Accessing Censuses

There are two main ways that you can access the census. Firstly, you can view the census pages on microfiche at certain large libraries or records centres.

Most of these places will only hold data relevant to the region they are in, so for example Leeds Central Library only holds census data for Yorkshire. If you wish to view census data from another region you will need to travel to that region and find a library there.

Searching on microfiche was for many years the de facto way of accessing census data, however it is extremely slow and tedious and often the pages are hard or impossible to read.

The second way you can access the data is on-line, and this has completely superseded microfiche based records. If you have an Ancestry account this will include access to all of the currently released censuses in full. Not only can you access all of the census data from home and print it for your records, it is much more legible than when viewing on microfiche.

In addition to this the data has been indexed, which means that you can actually search for the person you’re looking for and hopefully go straight to the page you need rather than spooling through a roll of microfiche reading every name. This makes it easy to find people who have moved since the previous census which can be nearly impossible using microfiche only!

This is absolutely invaluable and is the best way to use the census data. If you don’t have your own computer many libraries will now also have computers where you can access this data electronically. It is because of advances such as this that you can now find out in days what may have taken months before.

Be aware though that the indexing has been done by people doing their best to read original census sheets, so they contain many errors in spelling. For this reason, if you search for someone and they do not come up do not assume that they are not on the census, search though the pages on-line until you have found them the same you would using microfiche.

Before 1837

Once you move back beyond 1837 there are no censuses and no certificates to help you. Researching before this time becomes more difficult and is beyond the scope of this introduction, so we will not cover it in depth.

To give an overview, the only main source of data that will be available to you is parish records, which are the records made locally by each church. These will include baptisms, marriages and burials, so with a little work it is still possible to find BMD information from these records.

People were also much less mobile in this time and tended to stay in the same area more, so often you can go back several generations in one parish register if you are lucky.

Most parish registers are not available on-line, so you must find out where they are kept. Typically these will be at local archives offices but may also be held by the church still, so it is usually necessary to arrange a special visit to see them.

Some parish registers have been typed up into books and some of these books are available electronically, so it is worth searching on-line first though.

All content © Ian Atkinson 2000–2010, not to be re-used without permission.

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