Collins Tracing Your Family History

Introduction

Long before there were computer programmers and engineers, blacksmiths or even farmers, our ancestors told each other stories of who they were and where they came from. Over time, as other subjects became more important (or at least seemed to be), our ancestral tales began to take a backburner, the older ones blurring into creation myths but the more recent ones remaining important to their tellers and listeners.

When memories started to be written down, one of the first things to be recorded were ancient genealogies, linking the living to their ancient roots. It is for that reason that we can trace the Queen’s ancestry back through the Saxon royal family to their mythological ancestor, the god Woden. Yet for most, the rise of written records heralded a gradual erosion of oral traditions and, in medieval England, memories tended to grow shorter in proportion to the proliferating rolls of vellum and parchment recording our forbears’ deeds, dues and misdemeanours. And then, just as it became apparent to our ancestors that they were losing touch with the past, it crossed people’s minds that these self-same documents, compiled for no better reason than to record land transfer, court cases or tax liability, could help us retrace our past and discover the identities of our forgotten forbears.

My great-great-grandparents, Albert Joseph Adolph and his wife Emily Lydia, née Watson. When I started my research, they were as far back as my grandfather’s memory stretched.

This, the act of tracing family roots through both remembered stories and written records, is genealogy, the subject that has preoccupied most of my life, first as an amateur and later as a professional ever since, as a child, I encountered the pedigrees of elves and hobbits at the back of The Lord of the Rings. And it has been my good fortune that the past few decades have been ones of exceptional growth in genealogy as a pastime across the world, from a minority interest with snobby overtones in the 1960s to a mainstream activity, contributing significantly to the tourist industry and constituting one of the principal uses of the internet. In recent decades, it has broken through, too, into the media.

The author presenting BBC1’s 2007 Gene Detectives with Melanie Sykes.

NEW EDITION

FAMILY HISTORY is enjoying an extraordinarily dynamic phase and much is changing. In the last few years, internet companies have realised the profits to be made by setting up pay-to-view websites, especially covering the two great building blocks of 19th-century family trees, General Registration and census records. The small amounts paid by users fund further indexing work, thus bringing yet more records within far easier reach of more people than ever before.

These sites have truly revolutionised searching. When I wrote the first edition of this book, I would only have sought people in the 1871 census (for example) if I had a precise address, or had no alternative choice. Now, I can search the entire 1871 census online in seconds. I would make one plea, though: if you are new to this, please don’t take these new developments for granted, or grumble at the relatively very small amounts of money being charged. You are at a vast advantage over genealogists in previous generations. Equally, however, pre-internet genealogists did have to get to grips with and understand how these records worked in far more detail, and this tended to make them very good researchers. So, having saved a lot of time thanks to the internet, why not use some of it to read the relevant chapters of this book, so that you can form a more rounded picture of how the original records were created, and where the originals may be found? This edition is as up-to-date as it can be – yet improvements in accessibility occur almost monthly. These are exciting times indeed.

The first year of this millennium saw two series appearing on national television, BBC 2’s Blood Ties and my own series, Extraordinary Ancestors, on Channel 4. These were followed by further series with which I have been privileged to be involved, particularly Living TV’s Antiques Ghostshow and Radio 4’s Meet the Descendants, which have continued to tell stories of genealogical investigation and discovery.

My mother’s great-grandfather, Rev. Patrick Henry Kilduff – one of a treasure trove of old photographs I was given by a distant cousin whom I had traced in the course of my research.

Millions of people, including you, are now actively investigating their origins, or at least thinking about doing so. This complete guide is intended to cover all the topics you will need to know about how to trace your family tree. You can start at the beginning, letting it guide you through the process of getting started and working back through the different types of records which should, given time and patience, enable you to trace your family tree back for hundreds of years. Or, if you are already a genealogist, you can use it as a reference book to identify and learn more about the vast array of different types of source that may be available for your research.

In some respects, this book follows the standards already set out by its predecessors, and I fully acknowledge my enormous debts to genealogical writers who blazed the trail before me, not least Sir Anthony Wagner, Mark Herber, Terrick FitzHugh, George Pelling, Don Steel, John Titford and Susan Lumas. In other respects, and within the parameters set by what is expected of genealogical reference books, I have tried to add to this my personal perspective, not least by drawing on my experiences in translating genealogy into radio and television.

A NEW BOOK FOR A CHANGING WORLD

In this book, I have tried to reflect the extraordinary changes that have recently injected new life into this most ancient of subjects.

DNA technology

DNA technology has escaped the confines of the laboratory and become readily available to anyone with even a modest research budget. Do not be deceived by the relative brevity of my chapter on the subject; its implications for genealogy are vast.

Multi-cultural roots

Although Britain has always been a multi-cultural nation, a barrage of prejudices and phobias meant that we have only recently started to uncover the full extent of our global roots. Only in the last two decades have the many white families with black or Asian ancestors been able to start investigating such connections. Only recently have they been permitted by society and, in some cases, their own attitudes, to look on their connections with other continents with fascination rather than shame. Equally, thanks to the post-war mass immigration of black and Asian families, there are now a very great number of British families with roots exclusively from overseas. But by far the greatest trend, resulting from relationships between the different ethnic communities in Britain, is the rise of generations with roots both in indigenous white Britain and in other continents.

Shilpa Mehta (on the right) with her father, Shailendra, and brother, Shayur, in Zambia before her family settled permanently in England (see here).

Other genealogical writers have not ignored this fact, but nor have they addressed the issue in any depth. I felt that, in writing a book for genealogists in modern Britain, it was appropriate to broaden its scope to acknowledge the vast number of readers whose ethnic English blood – if they have any at all – is only a small proportion of their total ancestral mix. I have not attempted to write a worldwide guide to tracing family trees but, while the focus of the book is on research in England, I have tried to show and remind readers how the same or similar sources can be located and used in the rest of the British Isles and in countries all around the world. Please note that, when I refer to records outside Britain, I do so by way of example: the absence of a reference to a type of record in a certain country does not mean that records are not there. The volume of material available for America requires a separate book and has therefore been omitted almost entirely.

The internet

The internet has changed genealogy by making different types of records more easily searchable and by creating new resources that never existed before, such as the GenesReunited website. If you are serious about tracing your family tree, I recommend you either acquire a computer, find a good library or café providing internet access, or are very, very nice to someone who is already connected to the web. While you should never trust anything on the internet without checking it in original sources, the amount of time you can save using the resources available online is enormous.

The Genes Reunited Website home page: www.genesreunited.co.uk

On a daily basis, new indexes and resources appear, change, grow or, in some cases, disappear from the great information super-highway that is the worldwide web. Website addresses are so helpful and important that I have provided the ones that are most useful at the time of writing, and made them an integral part of the text. However, the rate of change inevitably means that, by the time you read this book, some things will have changed and proposed new legislation even threatens to restrict access to some of the records described here. In most cases, though, change will only have been for the better in terms of more records becoming more easily accessible via index and databases.

PROFESSIONAL HELP

I became a professional genealogist in 1992 after several years studying at the Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies. During most of my career, first working for a well-known firm of genealogists and latterly with my own freelance business, I have spent more time establishing what sources are available to solve particular problems and commissioning record agents to search them, than actually being in archives myself.

Connections between the past and present. My great-great-aunt Louisa Havers (1832–1937) at Ingatestone Hall, Essex, in 1917, with her young cousin Philip Coverdale who, as an old man, took me under his wing and taught me how to trace family trees.

This is a course of action I wholeheartedly recommend to all readers of this book. Many people say, ‘But I want to do it all myself.’ Fair enough – and use this book to acquire a detailed knowledge of the sources and their whereabouts. But there are many cases where paying a record searcher in a different county (or on the other side of the world) for a couple of hours’ work can save a vast amount of time, travel and accommodation costs, especially if the source you identified turns out to have been the wrong one. Receiving positive results by post (or email) may not be quite as exciting as turning over a dusty page and finding an ancestor’s name but, frankly, most records are now searchable only by microfiche in record offices anyway. The time you will have saved having the search done can then be spent visiting the place where you have discovered your ancestor once lived. If you really want to do it yourself, though, don’t let me stop you. I merely offer a piece of personal advice.

GETTING TO KNOW YOUR ANCESTORS

Throughout this introduction, I have referred to genealogy. There’s also a subject called family history. Essentially, genealogy is tracing who was who – the nuts and bolts of the family tree – while family history is more about finding out about the ancestors themselves, exploring their lives and working out how they came to do what they did and be who they were. That in itself then merges into the subject of biography. Once you have researched your family history in depth you will, in effect, have researched mini (or not so mini) biographies of your ancestors. Most, if not actually all, of the sources used by biographers are described in this book. Getting to know your ancestors can be a fascinating experience even if you do not (as people who have seen me in Antiques Ghostshow will know) want to roam into the world of psychics.

Filming the story of EastEnders’ convulted family tree on location at Elstree, 2000.

The author filming ITV’s Lost Royals at the College of Arms with former BBC Royal Correspondent Jenny Bond and Norrow and Ulster King of Arms.

But, in investigating your family tree, please bear in mind there is a real distinction between your ancestors and the records in which they appear. I have known people to cherish birth certificates as if they were the spiritual embodiments of their forbears. They are not. Think of when you last looked at yours and what a nuisance it is when you generate records similar to those you use for tracing ancestry. Obtaining passports and driving licences is a chore: dealing with banks, lawyers, the Inland Revenue and social services is tiring and invariably annoying. Often, when you encounter an ancestor in a record, they, too, were probably vexed and annoyed through the making of it. Equally, useful though they are, many modern genealogy programs and charts require you to focus so much on dates of birth, marriage and death that you can easily forget that the people concerned actually had lives in the intervening years. The real ancestors stand back behind the dates and records they generated: bear that in mind and you won’t go far wrong in learning to understand them.

CHAPTER ONE ASK THE FAMILY

With very few exceptions, nobody knows more about your immediate family than your immediate family. Yet the first steps in tracing a family tree are often ignored or skipped over in the headlong dash for illustrious roots and unclaimed fortunes.

Most people reading this will probably have made at least some sort of start at researching their family tree. This chapter gives structure to your first steps and, I hope, to all your research over years to come.

Family papers: a letter to my great-great-grandmother from her husband’s cousin, Mrs Dorthea Boulger (1908), concerning their family history.

STARTING OFF

However old you are, the very best way to start research is by writing down your own essential details, which are:

Then repeat the same process for your siblings, parents, their siblings, your grandparents and so on, adding details of when and where people died, if applicable.

One of the key elements here is write it all down because all this work will be to little avail if you do not record your findings.

Besides information on the living, you will soon start to record information on the deceased, as recalled by their children, grandchildren and so on. This is oral history – things known from memory rather than written records.

THE ORAL TRADITION

Originally, all family trees were known orally. In Britain, there are a handful of pedigrees of the ancient rulers of the Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Britons, Gaels and Picts, which stretch far back into the past, and which are known now because they were later written down. They contain some palpable mistakes and grey areas, but they are greatly valued because they are pretty much all we have left. Sadly, cultures such as Britain that adopted widespread use of written records tend very quickly to lose the oral history that has been accumulated over the centuries. For much of the Third World, and the native cultures of the Americas and Australasia, this invasion of literacy has happened much more recently, and oral traditions are still strong. With the spread of literacy, though, oral history is under threat and will probably disappear altogether very soon; hence the need to write it down and make it available on websites such as Genes Reunited.

LIFETIMES: A RICH ORAL TRADITION

JUST BECAUSE very few written records were made in pre-colonial Africa does not mean that family trees cannot be traced. Benhilda Chisveto of Edinburgh knew her father was Thomas Majuru, born in 1953, and that his mother was Edith, but that was all. She then made enquiries about her family from older relatives still living in her native Zimbabwe, and was told the following family tree, dictated orally and perhaps never recorded on paper before.

Thomas Majuru was son of Mubaiwa, son of Majuru (hence the modern surname), who lived near Harare, and who was apparently the only survivor of his area when British forces invaded in 1897. He buried the dead and then sought refuge in Murehwa, where the family now live. He was son of Mukombingo. Before Mukombingo, the line runs back, son to father, thus: Kakonzo; Mudavanhu; Mbari; Taizivei; Barahanga; Jengera; Zimunwe; Katowa; Mhangare; Maneru; Dambaneshure; Chihoka; Chiumbe; Musiwaro; Mukwashahuue; Makutiodora; Diriro; Gweru; Makaya; Chamutso; Guru; Waziva; Misi; Chitedza otherwise called Chibwe Chitedza; Nyavira also called Nyabira; Mukunti-Muora.