FAMILY HISTORY : FIRST STEPS 2

Now that you've gleaned all you can from close family members and drawn up a first draft of your family tree, the next step is to try to confirm what you've been told.

It is particularly important not to simply accept what great aunt Mildred told you without checking her story. In my own tree, my paternal grandfather was said to have had 4 sisters, 1 of whom died unmarried at about the age of 21; his father was, supposedly, Irish. The truth was somewhat different. His father did, indeed, have Irish ancestry but he had been born in London; the sister who died unmarried at the age of 21 actually had married her first cousin and died at the age of 25. She also had a daughter of whom no one in my branch of the tree had ever heard. To add to this story of hidden facts, my grandfather had an aunt who had 10 children, though she never married, and was the mother of the husband of my grandfather's sister who died. No one in my branch of the family had ever heard of this wayward aunt, and none of this was knowledge passed down to me by family members; it only came to light through in depth checking and cross-checking of what had been said.

For an overview of UK Genealogy and the available resources, the website at GenUKI cannot be beaten; a trawl through its pages will benefit everyone interested in researching their family history. There are a number of websites that carry indexes of birth marriage and death registrations, some of which are free. Checking to find the existence of these events for your ancestors is an essential element in confirming the accuracy of your tree; sometimes, it will be necessary to 'bite the bullet' and order a copy of a certificate, either from the relevant local Register Office or from the General Register Office  at Southport. Civil registration was introduced in England and Wales from 1st July 1837 and in Scotland from 1st January 1855; in Ireland, some marriages were registered from 1845 and all events were supposed to be registered from 1864. Before these dates, researchers have to rely on the parish records which generally contain less detail and can be more difficult to locate.

The other most used source for family history details are the censuses, conducted in the UK every 10 years since 1801. The first 4, those for 1801, 1811, 1821 and 1831, have mostly not survived and, where they have, are of very limited use. From 1841, the census recorded greater detail and, theoretically, listed every single person in the country; the bulk of these later censuses have survived, with a few lost elements here and there, and are now searchable on a variety of websites. However, be prepared to find that not everyone was actually recorded and also be prepared to find that the details recorded may not be correct - ages and birthplaces can be particularly problematic. The third major issue affecting census records is that the transcriptions are often erroneous in one or more details, meaning that searching often has to be inventive and it is always necessary to look at the original record to be sure of what was recorded. UK census records are currently available up to 1911, a 100 years closure rule being in operation.

Indexes for the birth, marriage and death records from 1837 can be searched at a number of websites including :

FreeBMD

Family Search

Ancestry

Find My Past

The Genealogist

Scotland's People

The first of these sites is free but only has BMD records, though it has sister sites with limited access to both census and parish records; the second is also free but has a vast range of records from all over the world, including census records. The others all require payment, either through subscription or purchase of credits, but also have other records including census, parish, wills and much more. Scotland's people, as its name implies, carries only Scottish records. Indexes of the Irish records of civil registration are available at the Family Search and Ancestry websites, though only up until 1922; Irish census records have almost all been lost.

With information gained from the above, you should now be able to start making real progress in your quest to identify more of your ancestry, well back into the mid, and even early, years of the 19th century.