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Genealogy is currently a very popular pastime and lots of people take the decision to trace their family history at some point in their lives. Sometimes it is to try and find distant relations who have not been heard of in decades; in other cases it is simply a matter of curiosity as we all like to know our roots and where our family originated from.
Much of this article only applies to England & Wales. Scotland's records are different: among other things the legal records are different as the legal system has a different basis from that of England, and the date when civil registration started is 1855, instead of 1837 in England.
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Whereas in England registration was not compulsory until 1875, in Scotland it was compulsory from the start and therefore more complete for the early years.
If you do decide to trace your family tree, the process can initially seem a rather daunting one but, thankfully, there are a great many genealogy resources available to help you discover the missing links in your family history. Many are online, but online resources are only as good as those who constructed the site. There is a lot of faulty data out there!
Whilst the power of the internet has made researching your family tree a great deal easier, you will still need to do some old fashioned leg work in the search for details and records from a long time ago. Many records are not online and possibly never will be.
There are many genealogy websites that can help you correlate the data you discover. Some websites are subscription only and you need to pay a fee to access the genealogical databases of information: ancestry, scotlandspeople, findmypast, but there are plenty more that are free to use and are packed full of useful information: familysearch, Freecen and Freereg, for example.
You may get lucky and find that a distant relative has already done the hard work for you. A site like Genes Reunited is a great place to start, simply enter the information that you have into the search boxes, surname, place of birth and date of birth etc. - the results may surprise you and bring up a number of trees that have your ancestor in common, but remember, someone else may have made errors, so don't take it all at face value: check it out.
Such sites are excellent places to find lots of useful information to help you trace your family tree back through several generations. Many sites also have links to other related sources of information. The best and most reliable site for links is Cyndislist.com. However, the best place to start is with your immediate family. Try writing down everything you currently know and can verify from certificates. Question every relative you can and use their information and records to build up as complete a picture as possible. Older relatives in particular may be invaluable in providing further insights into branches of the family you are not familiar with, but beware of lurid family tales – some are just that – tales.
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Once you have reached a point where the immediate sources of information dries up, the next step is to try researching further back in time using birth, death, and marriage certificates. Births, deaths, and marriages have been registered in England & Wales since 1837, and 1855 in Scotland, and 1864 in Ireland, so once you have a few bits of information, you should be able to fill in the gaps and trace your family back as far as the nineteenth century.
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Census records are important in finding a family group where an elderly relative or a cousin is staying with the direct family. You also get the birthplaces of people, not always where you thought. English census returns are available up to 1911, up to 1901 in Scotland, where a 100-year rule applies by law.
Returns are every 10 years, with the first year with names being 1841. Census returns are an invaluable source of information pertaining to occupations, which helps in identifying relatives in other records.
There are unofficial and local censuses of earlier date in some localities. Consult “Local Census Listings, 1522-1930: holdings in the British Isles”, by Jeremy Gibson and Mervyn Medlycott (Federation of Family History Societies, 2nd edition, 1994; now out of print)
It is usually better to concentrate on one surname at a time. The more methodical you are, the less likely you are to miss out important details as your search progresses. It is all to easy to get carried away when you begin to discover fascinating bits of information, but if you lose focus and get sidetracked, you might miss something crucial that could help you later on. Remember also that you can have more than one couple of the same names; and that not all records are complete.
Thank you to Gordon Johnson who contributed a lot of useful information and corrected a mistake in the article. Gordon has many years experience with Scottish genealogy, written a book on Scottish census records, and is a tutor for an online family history course run by Aberdeen University.
Gordon’s website Kinhelp.co.uk is well worth a visit.
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