WHO

DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?™

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF
GENEALOGY
THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO TRACING
YOUR FAMILY HISTORY
NICK BARRATT

Dedication

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

How to Use This Book

Section One: Getting Started

1: First Steps

2: Building Your Family Tree

3: Working in Archives

4: Research Tips and Hints

Section Two: Basic Sources

5: Civil Registration

6: Census Returns

7: Parish Records

8: Wills and Probate Documents

Section Three: Areas of Family History

9: Military Ancestors: The British Army

10: Military Ancestors: The Royal Navy

11: Military Ancestors: The Royal Marines

12: Military Ancestors: The Royal Air Force

13: Occupations: The Merchant Navy

14: Occupations: The Sea

15: Occupations: Mining

16: Occupations: Factories, Foundries and Mills

17: Occupations: Travel and Communications

18: Occupations: Farming and Agricultural Labourers

19: Occupations: Professional Classes – Private Sector

20: Occupations: Professional Classes – Public Sector

21: Occupations: Trades and Crafts

22: Migration: Immigration

23: Migration: Emigration

24: Family Secrets: Poverty and Lunacy

25: Family Secrets: Illegitimacy and Adoption

26: Family Secrets: Bigamy and Divorce

27: Family Secrets: Criminal Ancestors

28: Social History: Working Further Back in Time

Section Four: Troubleshooting Guides

Chart 1: Army Service Records, First World War

Chart 2: Army Service Medals, First World War

Chart 3: Early Army Service Records

Chart 4: Naval Service Records

Chart 5: Merchant Seamen Service Records

Chart 6: Royal Marine Service Records

Chart 7: RAF Service Records

Chart 8: Immigration

Chart 9: Emigration

Section Five: Key Resources

Origins and Meanings of Popular Surnames

Definitions of Historic Occupations

Genetic Genealogy

National Archive Profiles

Useful Website Addresses

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

Congratulations. By picking up this book, you have just taken your first step on a unique journey into your past, one that will gradually reveal lost generations of your family that you never knew existed; their place in history; and the path that has led you to stand here today, reading this. Thousands of others have started a similar voyage of discovery in recent years, each on a personal mission to reveal who their ancestors were, and what their lives were like.

One of the driving forces behind this phenomenon is the hit BBC TV show Who Do You Think You Are?, where every week a celebrity investigates their ancestral roots. Essentially a social history of Britain and its wider role in the world, the programme has stimulated millions of people to challenge their memories from school that history was a dull, academic subject and explore the past from a fresh perspective – that of their own relatives, rather than the politicians, generals and royals that tend to populate our textbooks. As a result, history becomes real, living and relevant; it’s a personal journey into the past, with your own relatives as the tour guides. Events that you might once have read about in a textbook suddenly take on a new meaning once you realize that your ancestors were there as eye witnesses or even participants. The most exciting thing of all is that everyone can trace their family tree – it’s not the exclusive preserve of those with privileged blood lines or aristocratic roots, but something that each and every one of us can do.

So why start looking into your family’s history? Traditionally the press have given genealogy a rather negative image. Indeed, one commentator was moved to write that family history was ‘self-indulgent navel gazing’. What utter nonsense! There are so many reasons why it is important to look into your family’s background, leaving aside the sheer joy of discovery that makes it such an addictive pastime. Perhaps the most important reason for starting is that you are going to discover more about yourself and your family, and gain a real understanding about where you have come from, who the main people were that shaped the fortunes of your family, and how small decisions in the past have had a knock-on effect over the years. In essence, every one of us is the living embodiment of the strands of personal history woven by our ancestors, all of whom contributed in some way to making us who we are today. In turn, their struggles to survive in a variety of changing conditions allow us to gaze into wider British social history, and ask questions about how we fit in. What was our class or cultural background? How did we fare in some of the great social upheavals in the past, such as the Industrial Revolution? Each generation faced a new challenge, and you can revisit these moments in time through your investigations.

‘Every one of us is the living embodiment of the strands of personal history woven by our ancestors.’

There is another important reason to set out on this voyage of discovery, namely to preserve these links with the past, which – once broken – are very difficult to repair. This is why, as you will see, you should always talk to your elderly relatives and record their stories, anecdotes and knowledge. It is a sad fact of life that we often take an interest in our past when it is no longer possible to talk to those who played such an important part in shaping it. Yet it is not just about preserving the past; by looking into your family’s background, you will be creating a legacy that can be passed on to future generations – children, grandchildren and those still to come. This is especially important in the digital age, when we are no longer creating the treasured artefacts that we now look for and preserve as keepsakes from years gone by – photographs, letters and postcards. Our means of communication – email, text, mobile phone – are instantly disposable unless we take active steps to preserve them, so it is just as important to record our thoughts and feelings now, or future generations won’t have the material to hand to understand us, or the people that made us who we are.

However, there are several myths about family history that you might have heard, and these need to be explained briefly. One misconception is that it is all about building a family tree as far back as possible. Whilst it is important to name ancestors and place them in history, the family tree is simply a map of your roots, showing you how your ancestors are related to one another. The real purpose of family history is to bring these names back to life by researching where they lived, what jobs they did, how their community changed over time, and the ways in which their lives were touched by local and national events. In many ways, the phrase ‘family history’ has rather outlived its use; instead, we should be thinking of ‘personal heritage’, as you’ll be creating a far richer, brighter and more interesting picture of your ancestors than a list of names on a page.

The second myth that needs dispelling is that family history can be done quickly via the Internet, and that all you have to do to track down your distant ancestors is log on, subscribe to a few websites, and you’ll have a family tree ready within hours. Sadly, this is completely untrue and misses the entire point of starting in the first place! As you will discover, there are certainly plenty of websites that will help you get started – and the datasets and databases that they contain continue to grow almost daily – and you will be able to achieve an amazing amount before you have to consider heading into an archive or museum. By putting the basic sources online, such as indexes to birth, marriage and death records, census returns and some wills, the process of constructing an initial family tree has been revolutionized. However, the Internet only provides a fraction of the resources you’ll need to flesh out the bones of your family tree and – as indicated above – bring your ancestors to life as real people who faced real challenges. This is where this book takes over, and leads you into the world of Britain’s archives, where there are original documents – often dating back centuries – that contain details of your ancestors’ lives, or were even written by them.

The aim of this book is to provide you with the relevant guidance, advice, information and inspiration to start out on this journey with confidence and realistic expectations. For the first time, a practical step-by-step tutorial for the beginner is combined with an overview of the basic sources you’ll need to get started, as well as the most comprehensive guide to the main family history topics that you’ll encounter as you progress: the brave men and women who took up the call to arms and served their country in one of the branches of the military; those who left the land and found work in a factory, ironworks or coal mine and therefore became the lifeblood of Britain’s industrial success on a world stage; the hopeful new arrivals coming to Britain to start a new life, at the same time as thousands more left these shores to emigrate to foreign lands that were brought into the orbit of the British Empire; or even those family secrets and hardships that our ancestors sought to hide from us. Furthermore, each section incorporates an overview of the social history behind the topic and surviving records that you’ll need to consult to track down your ancestors. Every chapter is illustrated with case studies from celebrities in the show, who have unearthed some amazing stories during their investigations. There are also two reference sections that offer practical research tips for the most common lines of enquiry; the meaning behind the top surnames and occupations you are likely to encounter; and detailed guides to the main archives in the UK and Ireland that you will have to visit to dig for information.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have been involved with Who Do You Think You Are? from the start, as consultant genealogist for the first four series and appearing at the end of each episode in series 1 to help explain some of the research that underpinned the programme. However, I came to genealogy via a background in academic history – my PhD is in medieval history and I first joined The National Archives as a research advisor in 1996, although I’ve worked in the field of personal heritage for over ten years, ever since I became involved in the BBC’s House Detectives. In 2000 I started my own research agency, Sticks Research Agency, to provide historical research and consultancy for the media.

The fascination with one’s past still creeps into battle-hardened professionals, and even though I deal with other people’s family history research most of the time, I still get drawn back to the mysteries in my own background. My mother’s maternal lineage is completely unknown, thanks to my mysterious grandmother who has taken her secrets to the grave with her. All we are left with are some photographs, tantalizing stories of being spirited out of Europe on the eve of the First World War, and a connection with the American financier Arthur Chase. Nevertheless, it is still possible to make a surprising breakthrough, even when you think there’s nothing left to find. One recent discovery has revealed a paternal great uncle who was caught spying for the Soviet Union in the 1920s, which only came to light via a random trawl of The National Archives’ catalogue. His name appeared in some newly released intelligence files, and on inspection they contained a dossier over 100 pages long chronicling his activities, including photographs of him as a young man; his First World War service papers; surveillance notes and phone intercepts; and an account of a sting operation that was meant to incriminate him. The material also answered a long unsolved mystery surrounding his death, as it revealed that he had committed suicide at the point when he realized that he was about to be unmasked as a spy.

As you will find when you start work on your own family, each question that you answer will lead to a whole raft of new questions – one of the main reasons why seasoned genealogists have been working away for decades. At the end of the day, the history of your ancestors is your story to tell – so enjoy the detective process, the thrill of the chase, and happy hunting!

‘The history of your ancestors is your story to tell – so enjoy the detective process.’

How to Use This Book

The Who Do You Think You Are? Encyclopedia of Genealogy is the definitive, comprehensive guide to tracing your roots, and putting them into the correct historical context so that you fully understand not just who your ancestors were, but also the way they used to live. This book is split into five sections.

SECTION ONE

Section One concerns the preparatory stages you need to do before you even start logging on or heading to the nearest library, record office or archive – the sort of work you can do at home and with your family to hand. It includes gathering initial information from your family; organizing it into a family tree; setting your research goals; and working out which archives you’ll need to visit first. These are crucial steps to take, and are often skipped over by enthusiasts straining at the leash – often with disastrous consequences later on. Remember, perfect planning prevents poor performance!

SECTION TWO

Section Two introduces you to the key resources you’ll need to build and expand your family tree, in particular civil registration certificates of births, marriages and deaths; census returns; wills and probate documents; and parish registers. These will provide sufficient clues to bring your relatives back to life as real people who lived interesting lives. Many of these are now available online, and should be used as building blocks to construct a secure foundation for your research.

SECTION THREE

Section Three is where it all gets personal. By this stage you will have built your family tree, and this section provides more detailed information about the ways you can investigate the historical context surrounding the names you have uncovered. There are several subsections, each reflecting a major theme of British social history over the last few centuries, many of which are likely to have directly affected your ancestors. The main topics covered include military history, as it would be a great surprise if at least one ancestor wasn’t involved in the forces at some point; occupations over the ages; migration into and out of Britain; family secrets, since we all have a skeleton or two lurking undiscovered in the closet; and wider aspects of social history, such as working further back in time and looking for blue-blooded ancestors. What makes the book unique is that there is a history of each theme as well as a description of the records you’ll need to consult, where to find them and how to use them.

SECTIONS FOUR & FIVE

Sections Four and Five provide supplementary practical advice and support to help structure your work as it progresses. Section Four contains troubleshooting guides which take you along some of the most common lines of research step by step, such as searching for military ancestors, or those who entered or left Britain over the last few centuries; whilst Section Five provides profiles and meanings of some of the most frequently occurring surnames and occupations that you are likely to encounter during your research; information on genetic genealogy, where you trace distant relatives through your DNA; and information about the key archives, institutions and websites that you will visit or use during your work.

So, if you are a novice family historian and you want to get the best out of this book, don’t skip over Sections One or Two. More experienced researchers might want to focus on Section Three. And if you get stuck, head for Sections Four and Five to kick-start your research in another direction.

SECTION ONE
Getting Started

The aim of this section is to encourage you to take those initial steps! Family history can be daunting and many people are put off because they simply don’t know where to start. The chapters in this section will take you through the key preparatory stages, from talking to your family to building your family tree, setting your research goals (so that they are realistic!) and locating the best place to start your research.

CHAPTER 1
First Steps

Every journey starts with a single step, and in the case of tracking down your ancestors your first step should be little more than a small pace. Your key resource is the knowledge contained within your family – biographical data, anecdotes and stories, personal documentation, and treasured family heirlooms, objects and artefacts. All of these can be used to build up a picture of your family in terms of acquiring facts such as ‘who is related to whom’, as well as an idea of what your relatives were like.

There are a couple of questions you need to ask yourself before you get stuck in, as the answers will determine the direction your research will take. So …

Why Do You Want to Start Your Research?

If you’ve ever watched an episode of Who Do You Think You Are? you’ll notice that the initial focus of attention is the celebrity researcher themselves – what they know, what they want to find out, and how they feel about their family. This process of self-reflection is exactly what you need do in real life, in the sense that it is your quest, and therefore you need to set your own research goals. You should take some time to reflect on why you want to find out about your family’s heritage.

‘The first step is to gather as much information as you can about your family, from your family.’

Everybody has a different reason. It may be to find out the truth about a long-standing family myth, such as the story passed down to Sue Johnston that her grandfather once drove the Flying Scotsman, or perhaps to find out more about yourself and why you have certain character traits, which was the original motivation for Bill Oddie’s investigation into the background of his mother – to find out why he felt abandoned by her at a young age, and understand the circumstances of her prolonged absences from the family home. Maybe your reason is to preserve the memory of the people who have shaped your destiny, in the way that Natasha Kaplinsky uncovered the truth behind what happened to her relatives who were killed in the Holocaust; or you may simply want to find out about your family out of personal interest, so that you have some stories to tell your children or grandchildren about their ancestors.

How Do You Want to Approach Your Research?

Your reason for starting out will largely determine what your initial research aims are. Although there are no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ ways of tackling research, there are several common ways to start out. Do you want to trace back as many generations as you can as quickly as possible, or would you rather look at each generation in detail and work back gradually? Some people prefer to concentrate on one side of their tree first, either their mother’s or father’s branch, and then begin the other side once they feel they have found all they can about the first branch.

You may find it easier to build a skeleton tree as far back as you can to start with, because this does not need to take very long now that the Internet has brought genealogy into our living rooms, and then concentrate on putting some more flesh on the bones of the characters you found most interesting from your preliminary research by digging around in the archives. Even if your goal is to discover as much as possible about one particular ancestor, it can be helpful to investigate who came before and after them, as these are the people who would have influenced that ancestor’s life and been a part of their world.

Reality Bites …

Who Do You Think You Are? at times can make family history appear to be quite easy – but in reality, it can be anything but! Months of research underpin each programme, and many of the actual steps taken to arrive at a pivotal moment in the storyline aren’t filmed or shown, simply because there isn’t enough time to squeeze them into the programme.

However, one thing that is reflected accurately on screen is the all too real sense of disappointment when a promising line of enquiry comes to an end. You have to be realistic with your initial aims; some families are going to be harder to trace than others, particularly the further back in time you progress. Similarly, if you have a very common surname in your tree, such as Jones or Smith, you will encounter difficulties tracing ancestors along that branch due to the sheer number of people who will share their name.

Equally, if you know very little about your family to start with, it will take that little bit longer to get the ball rolling and you will probably have to purchase more certificates until you can work your way back to the nineteenth century, where the availability of another important set of documents, the census records, helps to speed up the process. Both of these key sources are explained in more detail in Section Two.

It’s important not to be disheartened when you encounter setbacks such as these. You simply have to keep persevering, and you will find that the reward when you do discover that missing link is worth all the additional work. Genealogy is a detective process, and just like any investigation there will be times when you hit a brick wall and can seemingly go no further. There are tips about how to seek help to overcome these obstacles in Chapter 4.

Starting Out

The first practical step you’ll need to take is to gather as much information as you can about your family, from your family; and where better place to begin than with yourself? After all, it’s your journey. Write down everything you know about your immediate family, from your date of birth to your parents’ names, dates of birth and marriage, and see how far back you can go from there. Can you name all of your grandparents? Do you know their dates of birth, marriage and death if applicable? What about your eight great-grandparents? Can you name them, and provide similar details? It’s not as easy as it seems, and many people simply can’t give all of this data from memory. Nevertheless, even if you have doubts about what you think you know, it’s important to write down as much as you can remember about everyone at this stage.

Apart from this important biographical data which, as you’ll see in Section Two, you will eventually use to start tracking down original documents, you also need to focus on other aspects of their lives. In particular, you need to focus on where they were born, married, lived and died, as geography plays an important part in the detective process. Indeed, make a note of any scrap of information that you can find out about them, such as what jobs they did, whether they moved around and when they lived in certain places. It helps to write down the names and age differences of any siblings you know of as well, as these may enable you to narrow down a search in the archives later on.

Are there any family stories that were passed down to you that you want to find out more about? These will provide the colour in your family tree, and even trivial details can prove to be important in the next phase of your research, when you ask members of your family to comment on your memories. Did Uncle Albert serve with the Merchant Navy? What about great-grandpa, whose tales of valour in the Great War were retold regularly at Christmas? Memories of growing up in a foreign land, such as colonial India, can help you locate missing branches of your family when the time comes to search official records. Write down what you can remember about these snippets of information, and who told them to you. Research into these stories and family myths can run in parallel with your work constructing your family tree. You may find that as you build the basic tree the truth about some of these stories emerges, or it may become clear that more complicated research will be required to piece the jigsaw together, in which case Section Three of this book will be able to aid you.

SUMMARY

Recap of what to write down when making your initial notes:

• Your full name, dates of birth and marriage, names and dates of birth and marriage of your children and grandchildren

• The names and vital details of your siblings

• Your parents’ names, dates of birth, marriage and death if applicable

• The names and vital details of your aunts and uncles

• Your grandparents’ names, dates of birth, marriage and death if applicable

• The names and vital details of your great-aunts and uncles (the siblings of your grandparents)

• Anything you know about your great-grandparents, their siblings, and anyone who came before them

• Family stories you have heard and who told them to you

Widening Your Search: Talking to Your Family

Having written down as much information as you can about your forebears, it’s time to cast the net a little wider and draw upon the collective wisdom of your living relatives. Holidays such as Easter or Christmas, when the family tends to congregate, are often good times to begin your research, because festive gatherings tend to generate a sense of nostalgia, when folk naturally start to reminisce about happy times from the past, swapping anecdotes about relatives who may no longer be around to enjoy the festivities. If you can’t wait for a natural opportunity to arise, you can always organize a family reunion, making sure to invite as many of the older generations as you can. You will probably find that others are just as interested in your research as you are and will be eager to help you – story-telling is as much fun for the narrator as the audience.

Although you may have heard the same stories told year after year, there are probably plenty more that you haven’t heard, mainly because it’s easy to play down moments in one’s life that we think are uninteresting, but are actually fascinating to someone who wasn’t there. An ‘everyday’ childhood memory of growing up during the Blitz is still a powerful, unknown and chilling story to a later generation who have no concept of what it would have been like.

Aside from these colourful stories, it’s important to focus – as before – on simple biographical details of names, dates and places. This is why it’s important to talk to older members of the family; they can tell you about their parents and grandparents, folk that you are unlikely ever to have met other than in faded photographs. However, don’t forget to record details of their lives as well – where they lived, what their jobs were and, most important of all, what they were like as people. It’s all too easy to treat family history as an academic exercise, but these are the details you’ll want to pass on to other members of the family. You’ll be amazed at what you can uncover by spending several hours talking to a great-aunt – details of your grandparents as children, growing up in the countryside for instance, and working on a farm before moving to the city later in life. These conversations will peel back time and you’ll see your family in an entirely new light – your grandparents as children; your uncles and aunts as brothers and sisters; and generations of your relatives at work and play, in love and in mourning.

Sadly, many people leave it too late to start this important process, or simply don’t have any living relatives to help with this initial research. Whilst this makes things a bit harder, and removes the colour from the first stage of your research, it is still perfectly possible to start your family history from scratch, using the information on your birth certificate to find your parents’ marriage and birth certificates and then work back from there. If this is the case, the information in Chapter 5 will help you get started.

Interview Techniques

It may seem like the most natural thing in the world to sit down with your relatives and extract information, but in reality a great deal of planning ought to go into this process, not only to focus your attention on what you need to find out, but also to put your family at ease. After all, you don’t want them to think they’re about to face the Spanish Inquisition! It can be rather unnerving for both interviewer and interviewee at first, so you need to go out of your way to make the process as simple and fun as possible. For example, if you’ve set up a family gathering, you could even have a bit of fun and turn it into a game – initially asking the same few questions to everyone and comparing the answers afterwards to see who remembers the most, stimulating discussion and allowing you to focus on the most likely source of further information.

However, if you are spending time visiting members of the family individually, make sure you’ve compiled a clear set of questions, topics and people that you want to ask them about. Who was Great-aunt Alice? When was she born? Who was her husband, and when did they marry? Where was the ceremony? Did they live in the same area? So, Great-uncle Herbert was a farmer? Where was the farm? It’s also important to focus on one family member at a time, so that neither you nor your relative becomes confused. In general, you should concentrate on obtaining initial information about:

• Names, including Christian and nicknames, surnames and maiden names

• Dates of birth, marriage and death

• Places of birth, marriage, death and abode

• Occupations

Once you’ve obtained as much biographical data about a person as you can, it’s then time to ask about what the people were like. Having found out that Great-aunt Alice was born in London, but ended up marrying a farmer called Herbert in a remote part of Norfolk, the burning question is how did they meet? How did she adapt to life on a farm, having been brought up a Londoner? What was she like as a person?

This is where you’ll have to exercise your diplomatic skills, as people can ramble on a bit, and memory will play tricks if the events being described took place a long time ago. You will need to balance the desire to learn about a particular subject with the ability to let someone talk about their past without too much interruption, because we all love telling anecdotes. However, your relatives may not want to talk about everything that’s happened to them. Attitudes to illegitimacy have changed over time, and what to us is an interesting story might be a stigma that’s caused pain and misery for decades. If you sense that someone is uncomfortable talking about certain matters then do not force them to continue. It is better that you leave that topic of conversation so your interviewee does not feel pressurized. They may even decide to come back to talk to you about it at another time when they feel more comfortable.

‘If you are visiting family members individually, compile a clear set of questions, topics and people to ask them about.’

Alternatively, they might want to talk to a third party or non-family member about what’s happened to them. This is particularly true of painful memories that relate to war. You would be amazed how many former combatants don’t tell their families about their experiences to shield them from what they went through, but will happily talk to a military historian who they believe has a greater understanding. As a final resort, you can always suggest that your relative writes down their secrets in a sealed envelope and leaves it to you in their will. Although this may appear frustrating, it does give them the opportunity to take their secrets to the grave with them, yet still reveal what it was that they thought too sensitive to talk about.

If there is a particular story or person that fascinates you, it’s going to be important to talk to as many members of the family as possible, and compare different versions of the same tale – where accounts agree or overlap, there is likely to be a greater degree of truth. However, it’s going to be your job as a family historian to verify everything you hear, which is why good note-taking is essential to this process.

Oral history is invaluable to genealogists and historians, creating a living link with the past. It is preferable if you can record your interviews, because as each generation gradually dies out there are fewer and fewer people to speak to who remember a way of life that will never return, and can tell stories about colourful characters that would otherwise be forgotten by time. There are many ways of recording interviews now, so, if your interviewee gives their consent, make the most of the opportunity to video-record the conversation using a camcorder or digital camera. This way their memories and stories are preserved for future generations to watch and enjoy, and you could find a way of incorporating this material into a digital presentation of your research once you have finished. Ian Hislop made a very poignant observation when reviewing old cinefilm footage of his family on holiday: most of the time the camera was pointed not at his father, but at him – yet it was his father’s thoughts, feelings and stories that he wished to hear in later life.

‘Oral history is invaluable to genealogists and historians, creating a living link with the past.’

This is your chance to record your family, and you should urge them to be filmed – always respecting their decision to decline if they are really not comfortable with this process. At the very least, with permission try to keep a tape recorder handy to catch gems of information, and be sure to take clear, detailed notes that you will be able to go back to at a later date and decipher how each person is related, what details are relevant to which people, and who told you each scrap of information. It is important to keep a track of the sources of all your information so that you can return to that relation if you need to ask any further questions once you have begun your research.

Family Secrets and Myths

You should be prepared that you might find out more than you bargained for, and your discoveries may even change your perception of some family members. It can be exciting to uncover a skeleton in the closet of a distant relation who died long before your time, but there are often secrets kept within families even now that come as a surprise to a generation that is far more open than its predecessors.

Issues such as illegitimacy, adoption, bigamy and even criminal activity may creep into your family tree at some point in time, all of which will be discussed in greater detail in Section Three. If you do discover a potentially revealing aspect of a close relative’s past life, think carefully about how to deal with passing that information on to other family members or talking to the people it may have a direct effect on. It can take a long time before family secrets are accepted as being out in the open, and although moral values have changed so that what used to be considered scandalous behaviour is now not so, there are still many people who hold traditional values and find it difficult to discuss such behaviour. Furthermore, as the chronicler of your family’s history, it will ultimately be your research that becomes public knowledge, and your decision as to how much you tell people. Once information is out there, it can’t be taken back – so think long and hard before pursuing a family secret.

Verifying Information

While the information you glean from your extended family is vital to your research, be wary of believing everything you are told as fact. Oral historical accounts are invaluable, but are also subject to a certain amount of exaggeration and human error. Cross-reference the information you are given with lots of different family members, because details often get confused as time passes and people get older. Various individuals may have a contradictory account of the same event. The more information you are armed with, though, the easier your research should be. It is up to you to untangle the stories and find out who is right using primary sources in the archives.

HOW TO…

…avoid early errors

1. Cross-reference stories, accounts of names, dates, places and events with as many relatives as possible

2. Be wary of false relatives and aliases – establish exact relationships and find out everyone’s full names and nicknames

3. Use the second-hand information you are given as a guideline for your research rather than fool-proof fact

4. Be ready to substantiate everything with primary evidence

Never assume that dates and places you are told by relatives are correct, even if your source is adamant they are right. These are simply guidelines for you to follow to speed up the research process. Everything should be verified using official documentation where possible, such as civil registration certificates for births, marriages and deaths (described in Chapter 5) which will carry the official date and place that an event occurred. This is often at odds with the supposed ‘truth’ you were told by your family.

When collecting information from relatives, be aware that the names they knew ancestors by may not have been the same names they were christened and registered with. For example, Granddad Liam’s real name was actually Martin William, but he chose to use his second name, and then shortened that; Aunty Julie was actually born Mabel Julie. You will find that when looking for relatives’ documents in the archives it is essential to know their official name because you will usually need this to locate their records in alphabetical indexes. Nevertheless, if a relative was known by more than one name it helps to be aware of the various options, so that you have an alternative to look for if you do not find them under their official name.

False relationships can also be planted in the information you receive from other family members. For example, you may need to do a fair bit of pruning of the family tree to remove lots of aunts and uncles who earned the title through family familiarity rather than blood ties, as well as tidy up the loose use of ‘cousin’; Aunty Marie, who your Granny told you all about, was actually a close family friend rather than a blood relation, and Cousin Joyce may actually have been your Granny’s aunt, but because there was such a close age difference between them they were brought up more like cousins rather than aunt and niece. Make sure you gather the specifics about exactly how each person is related so that you are not misled in your research before it even begins.

Looking for Clues

Now that you have as many names from living memory on your tree as you can gather, along with dates, places and occupations to work with, it’s time to cast the net a little wider and start looking for physical clues. These can be tucked away in all sorts of unlikely places, such as in old boxes packed away in the attic or cellar; hidden in stuffed drawers; locked away in forgotten photo albums; or in safety deposit boxes in banks. You will be looking for a wide range of material, some of which may only take on a relevance once you’ve done a bit of initial research in archives. Given that you may not know precisely what you’re looking for at this stage, it’s important to try to get as many members of your family involved in the search for clues as possible, so that if anyone else stumbles across an interesting photo or family heirloom in the future they will let you know. Perhaps you will find some army medals or a wedding photo with names and a date on, giving you an immediate link to a military archive or the search for a marriage certificate. These forgotten objects can help immensely with your research, as they usually contain clues and spark up new lines of investigation.

Names and dates are often written on the back of old photos, regiment or ship names often inscribed on military and naval medals, or written on badges and uniforms; and all this memorabilia is evidence of your ancestors’ existence and can fill in the gaps that are no longer within living memory. On the other hand, if you come across family heirlooms and are unsure where they have come from, be sure to ask other people in your family that might know. You are bound to find old photos and not be able to name one single person in them, so why not scan them and email a copy round to the rest of the family to see if they can help.

Make a special effort to locate birth, baptism, marriage and death certificates, as these can help verify the information you have been given from relations and can save you the money you would otherwise need to spend ordering duplicate copies from the General Register Office (see Chapter 5). Any copies of other official records you can find that may have been kept, such as wills, title deeds and legal documents, are a great stepping stone for your research, giving you a concrete foundation to work from and often supplying you with more names to add to your tree. Wills are particularly useful because they very often name members of the extended family and explain how they are related to the deceased person, and indicate where someone lived, who their dear friends were and what they did for a living – as well as possibly lifting the lid on a family secret or two, such as an illegitimate child given a sum of money.

If official documentation has not survived you may be lucky enough to find newspaper articles about your relatives that are often cut out, kept and treasured, perhaps if somebody did something that deserved special comment in the local paper. Wedding announcements and descriptions of the special day were very popular in the nineteenth century; or if one of your ancestors was well respected within the local community, an obituary may have been written about them shortly after their death. As well as newspaper reports, school reports can be just as enlightening, giving you an idea of what that person was like as a child.

Some families used to keep a family bible, handed down through generations, in which details of births, baptisms, marriages, spouses’ names, deaths and special family events might be recorded. If you are lucky enough to have a surviving copy of this your workload will be instantly cut down. Family bibles can detail names and dates going back way to the early nineteenth and even the eighteenth century, and can often pre-date civil registration which, as you will see in Chapter 5, was first introduced into parts of Britain in 1837. As with all the sources you find, however, it is wise to double-check every bit of information that it contains against official records, because some family bibles may have been added to at a later date and could contain discrepancies.

Name patterns are usually a clue to the past. If an unusual first name or middle name has been passed down through a few generations, this can be an indicator that it was a maiden name of one of the women in your family tree that was passed down to her child and their subsequent descendants as a Christian name so that it was not lost after she took her husband’s surname. For example, Basil Fanshawe Jagger was the father of Mick Jagger, lead singer of The Rolling Stones; a few simple searches revealed that Basil inherited his rather unusual middle name from his mother, Harriet Fanshawe. Keep an eye out for these distinctive names among the documents you uncover and see if you can locate the original source of the name when you start your research in the archives.

Until the late twentieth century, handwritten or typed letters were the main form of communication between family members who lived apart. The advent of email and mobile phone communication has changed all of that, so that correspondence with loved ones can be disposed of with the click of a button. Therefore, old letters that have survived can be of tremendous sentimental value to family historians, as well as being a great practical research aid, giving not only names and addresses, but also an idea of your ancestor’s personality from their style of writing and sometimes giving an insight into their day-to-day lives. You should also look out for old postcards that can give you an idea of the kind of social standing your ancestor may have had. If they travelled abroad before cheap flights made this a common phenomenon, you will know that they probably lived quite well.

The First and Second World Wars produced an enormous amount of central government administration, a lot of which is stored safely in our national archives and is discussed in Section Three. But many of the by-products created by officialdom also ended up in people’s homes. Some soldiers held onto their discharge papers after they had completed their military service, or would have received letters granting them exemption from compulsory conscription into the army, and many of those that did serve received medals or kept part of their uniform apparel as a souvenir of their contribution to the war effort. If you can find documents proving that your ancestor fought during either World War, or even that they were in the army, air force, navy or merchant navy before or after the wars, these will give you an indication of where you need to start looking to find any more documents that may be held in the archives for them. If you have an idea of the date they served and their rank, this is often enough information for you to start with, as will be explained in Section Three. Most medals were awarded for service at a particular time or for specific battles or events, so if you do find medals around the house you can examine the design to identify what they were awarded for.

In addition to the military paperwork generated by the wars, a wealth of civilian material also survives from that era, such as ration books, letters to and from loved ones separated by conflict, and telegrams from the army informing next of kin of the death of a soldier, all of which illustrate how difficult that time would have been for your ancestors. Civilian documents issued at other times are equally informative, like passports with a person’s photo, vital details and stamps from the places they visited, or identity papers and naturalization certificates if they settled in Britain from a foreign country.

Do not pass off as junk the general day-to-day items you might find when hunting in the attic or through drawers. Old receipts, tickets to the theatre, ballet, opera or to a football match, magazines that have been kept, all give an idea of what your ancestors enjoyed spending their money on and doing in their spare time. These are key indicators to what their lifestyle would have been like, and what they were like as people. If they believed that these bits and pieces were worth holding onto then that is an obvious clue as to what was important to them.

SUMMARY

Clues to look out for around the house:

• Civil registration and religious certificates confirming births, marriages and deaths

• Wills, deeds and legal documents

• Newspaper articles and obituaries

• School reports

• Family bible and name patterns

• Letters and postcards

• Military, naval, air force and merchant navy documents, medals and uniform apparel

• Civilian wartime letters, ration books, identity cards

• Passports and citizenship documents

• Old receipts, magazines, tickets to the theatre or to football matches

• Photos

Photos are by far the most fascinating of our family artefacts. Even if we cannot name the majority of people in the frame it is always interesting to observe the different fashions, expressions and landscapes, and to try to work out when the picture was taken and what those people’s lives would have been like. Photos in the Victorian and Edwardian periods were often very formal. Most people did not have a camera of their own and would have visited a photographer’s studio or had their picture taken at a photographer’s stand at a fair. The rarity of a photo opportunity during these eras meant that people wore their finery or would borrow clothes from the studio’s wardrobe to dress up for the occasion. The clothes worn by the subjects can help you to identify a rough date for the photo, as specialists can establish when specific types of dress were fashionable. Your local archive or museum may be able to help you date the costume or background in an old photo. Photographic studios frequently printed their company name and address on photos, so you can trace this in trade directories to establish when that studio was in business, and to work out the rough geographical location where the person in the photo was living.

Do not be scared to take a photo out of its frame to ensure that there are no names or other written details hidden on the back. If the picture does not have any names or a date written on it, show it to as many elderly relatives as you can to see if anybody recognizes the faces or location. It might also be a good idea to make copies of photographs you find in relatives’ houses, either by scanning them or taking digital photographs of the images – having obtained permission first. This way you can write on the back of your copies each time you identify a new face. Carry the pictures around with you so that you can keep adding to them as you show more relatives. You can also find out about how to preserve old photographs, or restore fading images, from local archives and specialist companies who now offer fairly cheap methods of storage and restoration techniques.

‘Do not be scared to take a photo out of its frame to ensure that there are no names or other written details hidden on the back.’

Preserve Your Past for the Future

Whilst talking to your extended family and delving into the family treasures they have hoarded, it will become apparent just how important it is to preserve your own family photos and mementos for future generations. Your children, nieces, nephews or grandchildren may not seem interested in their past while you are enthusiastically hunting away in the archives, but there will more than likely come a time when they will be curious to flick through old photo albums, read old family letters, and learn more about a past era that seems so different from today, but that their parents and grandparents were a part of.

The fantastic thing about genealogy is its educational element. Whilst finding out the names, dates and places of each person on your family tree, it is essential to put their lives into a social context, to find out what the major political and social events were that would have shaped their lives and affected their standard of living. Might they have visited the Great Exhibition when it opened in Hyde Park in 1851? Did they fight in the Boer War at the turn of the last century? Would they have been shocked to hear news of the Titanic’s sinking in April 1912? Placing your family history into a wider national and international historical context brings textbook history to life. These people you are related to really did exist, and while the name ‘John Briggs’ on a census return may not seem immediately exciting, when you look at the bigger picture and learn more about what life was like for him living in a Victorian slum, his existence gains meaning and our combined national past seems closer. As you find out more about each ancestor and can pin major historical events to their lives, you can help the children in your family to understand their history.

SUMMARY

• What is the aim of my research?

• What do I know about my ancestors?

• What do my relatives know about our ancestry?

• Are there any family mysteries to clear up?

• Are there any family heirlooms to give me some clues?

• What information do I need to verify?

Genealogy is not just about the past; it is also about preserving the present for the future. So why not keep hold of a few items that may seem inconsequential today but will help to illustrate some of the defining events of your life in the future. Just as you write down the names of the faces you learn about on old photos you find, make the same effort with your own photos so that people will be able to identify you and your loved ones. The following chapter will explore ways of storing your research and organizing your findings so that the whole family can enjoy your hard work, but remember – it’s all too easy to concentrate on the past at the expense of the present. Make sure that you are at the heart of your research, so don’t forget to leave behind an impression of what you were like. After all, you have just become the chronicler for your family, and future generations will want to know all about you!

CHAPTER 2
Building Your Family Tree

By now you will have spent many hours writing down what you know about your family, talking to relatives and looking for physical clues and objects that have accumulated over the years. The next stage is to organize this information into a family tree, and use this to choose which path then to follow – verifying information you are uncertain of; searching for new ancestors; or pursuing an interesting relative or family story in more detail.

Creating a Family Tree

A family tree is a diagram that shows at a glance how your relatives and ancestors are related to one another. This will become the foundation of your future work, a growing document that incorporates all the biographical information you uncover as you hunt for documentation in archives, libraries and museums. The importance of building a family tree from the instant you start your research at home has already been touched upon in Chapter 1, but you will learn here just how vital it is to keep updating your tree after every discovery so that you can see at a glance what your next research step should be.

People can get quite confused about drawing up a family tree, assuming it is a more complicated process than it really is. There are many software packages on the market that promise you an all-singing, all-dancing family tree with generational reports, photo uploads and print-outs. But if this is your first attempt to put a family tree together, it’s probably best to go back to basics until you’re more familiar with the procedure, and simply use a large piece of paper and a pencil.

‘A family tree shows how your ancestors are related to one another – and to you.’

This section will show you the various methods of writing family trees and the abbreviations and genealogical terminology used. Some of this may be familiar. If you’ve watched Who Do You Think You Are? regular graphics appear on screen to show you how, for example, John Hurt is related to Walter Lord Browne. Or you may have seen pedigrees published in books or newspapers that relate to the royal family or members of the aristocracy. Even though you may not have such distinguished roots, the principle behind a family tree’s construction remains the same.

However, before attempting to build your first family tree, it’s important to have a basic grasp of some of the terminology used, since you’ll need to describe how members of your family are related to one another.

Understanding Family Relationships

In essence, this will be your family tree, so anything you produce should start with you, with your name placed right at the centre of the blank piece of paper. Everyone else is therefore described in terms of their relationship to you. On this embryonic family tree, your parents’ names will be written above you; your brothers and sisters – known as your siblings – will be either side of you, also underneath your parents; and the names of any children you have will be written below you, with their children – your grandchildren – below them. Above each of your parents will be their parents – your four grandparents – and alongside each of your parents will be their siblings, your uncles and aunts.

Every group of people on the same horizontal line represents a separate generation. Most people are familiar with these terms, but these are all close family members, and you will be working many generations back into the past when it becomes harder to keep track of distant relationships; so listed below are some of the key words used to describe relatives from the extended family, and ancestors further back in time, which are perhaps less familiar.

Blood Relations

The direct line in your family tree is made up of all the people who have been biologically crucial to your creation. Therefore they would include your parents and your grandparents, but not any of their siblings and other descendants – these people are your extended family. Each time you move one generation further back, you need to add ‘great’ as a prefix. Therefore the parents of your grandparents are known as your great-grandparents, and the parents of your great-grandparents are your great-great-grandparents, and so on. Every time you search for another generation in your direct line you will be looking for twice the number of people as the generation that came after that. This is because you have two parents, who each have two parents, so that you have four grandparents. These four grandparents have two parents each, which means you have eight great-grandparents, and then sixteen great-great-grandparents. As you work further back than this, you might find it easier to shorten this description to ‘2 x great-grandparents’.

Extended Family by Blood

These are the people that are related to you by blood, but are not biologically crucial in your existence today. Where possible, you should include them in your family tree – particularly after your first phase of research – but you might want to focus on your direct ancestors and come back to them at a later date.

Nieces and Nephews

Your nieces and nephews are the children of your siblings. Niece is used to describe a female offspring and nephew to describe a male offspring. Any subsequent children of your nieces and nephews are known as your great-nieces and great-nephews, and another ‘great’ is added to the prefix each time another generation is born.

Uncles and Aunts

Your uncles and aunts are the siblings of your parents. The siblings of any previous generations in your direct line are described by adding ‘great’ as a prefix, and each generation you go back another ‘great’ is added. Therefore the siblings of your grandparents would be your great-uncles and great-aunts, and the siblings of your great-grandparents would be your great-great-uncles and great-great-aunts. Some people use the word ‘grand’ instead of ‘great’, and might describe these relations as ‘great-grand-uncles and aunts’.

‘This is your family tree, so everyone else is described in terms of their relationship to you.’

Cousins

Your cousins are the children of your aunts and uncles. These are known as your first cousins. Any subsequent descendants of your first cousins are indicated by how many generations they are ‘removed’ from you. If your first cousin has a child, this child is your ‘first cousin once removed’. If your first cousin then has a grandchild they would be your ‘first cousin twice removed’. First, second and third cousins can only be used to describe cousins of the same generation. Therefore, if you had a child, they would be second cousins with your first cousin’s child. This means that while you refer to that relation as your first cousin once removed, your child would call them their second cousin.

To describe the cousins of any previous generations to yourself, you should refer to them as the cousin of whichever person in your direct line they are of the same generation as. This means that the parent of your second cousin should be called your ‘parent’s first cousin’, and the grandparent of your third cousin would be your ‘grandparent’s first cousin’. The relationships between cousins is very confusing and you may find that in documents such as wills and census returns people use the word cousin to describe a distant relative without qualifying exactly how they are related. It will be your job to untangle this confusion!

Extended Family by Marriage

Families are complicated entities, and as well as direct blood relatives and their extended family you will quickly discover that there are other relationships that are more complicated to define – usually the result of divorce, subsequent remarriage and an associated second family. Here are some of the more useful terms that you may need to incorporate into your family tree.

In-laws

When one member of your family marries, they are related to their partner’s family as a result of the wedding. This relationship is said to be ‘in law’ due to the legally binding nature of the union. Thus the mother of the bride is the ‘mother-in-law’ of the groom, just as the father of the groom is the ‘father-in-law’ of the bride. If either the bride or the groom has siblings, then they become the sister- or brother-in-law of the other party.

Step-relations

The word ‘step’ is used to describe the relationship to a member of your family that occurs through a subsequent marriage by one (or indeed both) of your biological parents. Your stepfather would be your biological mother’s husband from a subsequent marriage, whilst your stepmother would be your biological father’s wife if he married again. If either of your step-parents had children from a relationship prior to marrying your biological parent, these children would be your step-brothers and stepsisters; whilst they would be described as your biological parent’s stepsons and stepdaughters.

Half-relations

The word ‘half’ is used to describe a relationship between children who share only one biological parent. For example, if your biological father or mother had a child with your step-parent, this child would be your half-brother or half-sister.

Drawing Your Family Tree

Using these terms, you should be able to build your initial family tree quite quickly; and it should display all the information you’ve found when you were interviewing relatives and looking through collections of family heirlooms. There are bound to be some things that you don’t know yet – full names and biographical dates of more distant ancestors, for example – and you should add question marks against anything you’re not sure about. This is one of the main purposes of this first family tree – to show at a glance what you need to verify, check or research more fully. Don’t worry if it looks messy at this stage or a bit sparse – you’ll be tidying it up and adding new branches when you start your research away from the family.

One thing to decide upon is the presentation style of your family tree, bearing in mind there are several recognized ways of doing this and the final choice will be down to you, based on what you find easiest to work with and how much data you wish to include. Some trees will only show the direct line, whereas others are very large and sprawling, and include all the siblings in each generation and distant cousins.

In the past, genealogy was the preserve of the aristocracy – or those that aspired to higher social rank – who wished to prove their connections to illustrious forebears. They commissioned diagrams, or ‘pedigrees’, that were as much works of art as family trees, with coats of arms, heraldic beasts and key names circled. A pedigree that shows immediate ancestors as far back as the sixteen 2 x great-grandparents is known as a seize quartiers, whilst one that covers all thirty-two 3 x great-grandparents is known as a trent-deux quartiers. These linear trees start with the most recent generation at the bottom of the tree, and continue horizontally upwards, with each entry representing people further away in time from the person at the foot of the tree. However, only key relatives, rather than all 16 or 32 direct ancestors, are often shown as they often focused on connectivity to the great and the good, or key marriages, rather than completeness.

Today, family trees that only show a direct line are often drawn not from bottom to top, but from left to right, with the most recent person on the left and their ancestors spreading out from them to the right of the page. There are pedigree templates for trees in this format available from the Society of Genealogists and local Family History Societies that simply require you to write the names and relevant dates in the spaces provided on the form.

While family trees that show just your direct line are a quick and easy way to map your immediate heritage once you have worked back far enough, it makes sense to include your entire extended family to start with as they can provide clues to help you move back further. UK genealogists favour drop-line family trees for this purpose, and these are the most common format you are likely to come across in books. Essentially, they are a diagram that shows how everyone is related to one another; and most people start by placing their own data at the heart of their family tree – sensible really because, after all, they are the ones undertaking the journey and will therefore be describing the people they find in relation to themselves.

You should write your full name, which should be the name you were registered with at birth, rather than a nickname or surname you took later in life. Therefore married women should always be written onto the tree under their maiden name, not their married name. Underneath your name, write a ‘b.’ to signify ‘birth date’ and then write your date of birth after that. Draw a horizontal line above your name and a small vertical branch coming down from the line to connect your name to it – a bit like a large ‘T’ shape with extended horizontal arms. Any siblings you may have should have their names attached to the horizontal line in the same way, which effectively creates an entire branch for your generation. You should start with the eldest sibling first, whose name should be written to the left of the branch, and work along to the right so that if you were the third child, for example, you would appear third on the branch, and the youngest sibling’s name is positioned at the far right-hand end of the branch. Write every sibling’s date of birth in the same way you did for yourself. If any of them have died you should write a ‘d.’ underneath their birth date, followed by their date of death.

Above your generation’s branch you need to write your parents’ full names. Traditionally, the man’s name should be written on the left and the woman’s on the right. Leave enough space between them to put either ‘m.’ or ‘=’ to indicate their marriage, and write their date of marriage beneath this. Below the date of marriage you should draw a vertical line that connects their marriage to your generation’s horizontal branch, thus showing that you are all related by blood. You can use the same method to add your own marriage date and spouse’s name, and the marriages of your siblings if you wish. You may want to include subsequent generations after yours, such as your children, nieces and nephews, grandchildren and so on, in which case you will need to leave enough space below your generation to fit them in. Where space permits, each generation of children should be at roughly the same level on the tree – your nephews and nieces roughly alongside your children. However, if you are only creating a tree of your ancestors and not your descendants, then your name should be positioned towards the bottom of the page to allow more space for you to work back in time, up the page.

You may come across trees that depict relationships between parents and a child using a dotted vertical line rather than a solid one. This can be used for various circumstances. In the past when illegitimacy was deemed to be a problem, particularly for wealthy families for reasons of inheritance, a dotted line might indicate that a child was born out of wedlock or as the result of an affair. It can also be used to highlight a non-blood relationship between parent and child in cases of adoption.

‘It is vital to keep updating your tree after every discovery so that you can see at a glance what your next research step should be.’

You can now repeat the process you used for your own generation to put your parents’ siblings either side of their names, each set of their parents’ names above their branch, and keep repeating the process as far back as you can. The further back you work and the more siblings there are, the more difficult it can become to have them in age-descending order. You may find it more practical to put all your aunts and uncles, great-aunts and uncles and so on in age order but leave the name of the direct ancestor at one end of each branch so as to keep the diagram clear. If you do not know a woman’s maiden or unmarried name, leave her surname blank so that you can fill in the space when you discover it. The same rule should apply to any other details you are unsure of, such as dates of birth, marriage or death. These will give you points to work towards, so that every generation has a complete set of details whereby each person’s full name and their dates of birth, marriage and death are all known.

Some genealogists include occupations on their trees simply by writing these underneath each person’s vital details. Having occupations displayed on your tree can help you to keep your work focused, so that if you are looking for a Jack Brown on the 1901 census you can use your tree as a reminder of his date of birth and marital status, and also of what job he should be described as holding. This can be of assistance if there are lots of people who have the same name in your tree but who can be distinguished by occupation. For example there may be a John Smith who was a woodcutter and a John Smith who was an engine driver. Alternatively, if a particular name was carried down through many generations you may find it useful to add a roman numeral after their name, indicating which generation they belong to. In this way the first William Perry, whose name was passed down to his son, then his grandson and great-grandson, would be known as William Perry I, his son would be William Perry II, his grandson would be William Perry III, and so on.

A family tree is not always drawn in a diagram, but can also be written using indented paragraphs. This requires the use of many of the abbreviations listed in the box in Abbreviations in Family Trees to explain relationships in place of branches that would otherwise be drawn. Known as the ‘narrative indented pedigree’, this is not always the easiest method of reading a family tree as it can sometimes be confusing to follow, but it is the most straightforward way of typing up your tree if you are using a word-processing package to record your family tree, which does not allow you to draw branches very easily. It is also very handy to understand this method of describing a tree because some pedigree publications use this style, like Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage and Debrett’s Peerage and Baronetage (see Chapter 4). The indented pedigree starts with the earliest known ancestor and their marriage, and then lists the children from this marriage in age-descending order (although sometimes female children are listed after the male children instead). To list the children’s offspring an indented paragraph is added under each child’s name where their descendants’ details are written. Therefore a narrative indented pedigree might look like this:

James Sherwood m. Alice Clarke. Had issue:

John Sherwood b. 1648 and m. Jane Cecily. dsp.

George Sherwood m. Carole Vine and had issue:

Simon Sherwood b. 1672

Joseph Sherwood b. 1675 and m. Mary Shanks 1699.

He d. 1722 leaving issue:

Katherine Sherwood b. 1702

Grace Sherwood b. 1705

Emily Sherwood

Sarah Sherwood b. 1645.

Faye Sherwood unm.

This pedigree explains that James Sherwood married Alice Clarke and had four children, John, George, Sarah and Faye. John married Jane Cecily but he died without children. George married Carole Vine and had three children named Simon, Joseph and Emily. These were therefore James Sherwood’s grandchildren. His grandchild Joseph Sherwood married Mary Shanks in 1699 and died in 1722 leaving two daughters, Katherine and Grace, who would have been James Sherwood’s great-grandchildren.

Irrespective of what style of family tree you eventually decide to use, it will hopefully grow too big for your original piece of paper, so you will probably need to break the tree into sections to make it more manageable. While it is nice to have your entire family tree on one piece of paper, you should be constantly referring to it to help organize your research, and for this reason it usually makes more sense to break it down into smaller branches, perhaps with your paternal side on one tree and maternal side on another. Some people find that smaller trees of individual generations are useful for taking to archives. These can then be updated regularly and annotated while you are in the archives, and the new information transferred to your master family tree at a convenient time.

Abbreviations in Family Trees

Here are some examples of words and abbreviations used specifically in family trees:

b. born

m. or mar. married = married

2. second marriage

d. died

ob. or obit. died

d.s.p. or o.s.p. died childless

d.v.p. or o.v.p. died before father

1. left descendants

bapt. or bp. baptized

chr. christened

bur. buried

lic. licence (marriage licence)

MI monumental inscription

c. circa or about

? uncertain or unknown

o.t.p. of this parish

w. wife

s. son

s. and h. son and heir

dau. daughter

g.f. grandfather

g.m. grandmother

g.g.f. great-grandfather

g.g.m. great-grandmother

inf. infant

spin. spinster (unmarried woman)

bach. bachelor (unmarried man)

unm. unmarried

div. divorced

wid. widow (a woman whose husband has died)

wdr. widower (a man whose wife has died)

mat. maternal or female side of the family

pat. paternal or male side of the family

Distaff female side of the family

Spear male side of the family

Online Family Trees

Online family trees and family tree software packages are extremely helpful to collate your tree in its entirety so that you can share it with other family members, and to organize the end product of your research. Using these resources saves you the effort of constantly rewriting a large family tree if you run out of space or make mistakes, because you can easily log onto your electronic tree and edit the details as needed. Most genealogy software now saves your family tree and genealogical data as a GEDCOM file, which stands for Genealogical Data Communications. This has been created to make sharing your tree easier, regardless of the software you use.

SUMMARY

The important components of a comprehensive family tree are:

• Names, including Christian or forename, surname, maiden name and any nicknames

• Dates of birth, marriage and death

• Place of birth, marriage, death and abode

• Occupation

You can buy computer software packages to upload onto your PC, such as Family Tree Maker, Roots Magic, Family Tree Builder and Family Historian – all are popular and very flexible in how you can organize your data. They will come with instructions on how to print out your tree once you have uploaded it using the software, and most software now shows you how to build your own family history website using one of their website templates. Alternatively, there are many free family tree tools available from genealogy websites, which just require you to register your details on their website to create an account, after which you can share your tree with other enthusiasts online. Most of these also give you the option of keeping most of the details on your tree private or only accessible by users who ask for permission to view your tree first.

The four sample websites described below will be looked at in more detail in Chapter 4 in the context of the sets of data and documents they offer, but their family tree building tools and software are examined here.

www.genesreunited.co.uk

Genes Reunited is a sister site of Friends Reunited and works as a database of family trees, enabling people to find others who are looking for the same ancestors. Other users will not see your full family tree unless you grant them permission after they have emailed a request to view it. You can search the Genes Reunited database of names, years and places of birth to see if any match the people in your tree. To make contact with other researchers you need to upgrade to a full membership for a small fee. When uploading your family tree, each person you add has a fact sheet to complete, listing their names, dates and places of birth, marriage and death, occupation, any notes, and a photo. You can view your family tree in a drop-line format showing all your relatives, just your ancestors or descendants, or your immediate family. It is possible to search the database’s collection of historical records and merge these into your tree, and the software will automatically use these to create a lifeline for each person showing the key events of their life. Genes Reunited also has a special print function for printing out your family tree diagram.

www.ancestry.co.uk

Ancestry is an online genealogy company that provides, along with many millions of records, access to family tree building software and the facility to upload it onto their website. They have created a free online template that can be accessed by clicking the ‘My Ancestry’ link along the top of the homepage. The Ancestry family tree facility creates a homepage for each person on your tree, where you can enter their dates of birth and death, their spouse’s details and children’s names, upload photos, write a biographical story, and add events to a timeline. A summary of the information you enter is displayed on a family tree showing the direct line, working from left to right. Ancestry has a search facility that checks the details you enter against its collection of historical records and other users’ family trees to see if there are any matches. This can help you get into contact with other people who may be researching part of your tree (which is usually because you are related somewhere along the line). You can change the privacy settings for your tree so that it can only be viewed by those people you email it to, otherwise the default setting puts your tree in the public domain so that other Ancestry users can find the information it contains.

www.myheritage.com

MyHeritage is a genealogy company that provides free family tree software that you can download from their site. This software allows you to create a family tree on your computer and add photos and documents to it using a simple interface. If you wish, you can then publish your family tree online to share it with family members. The MyHeritage.com homepage also lets you create a free family tree online, without downloading software. This is done in your own family website which you can use for sharing photos, events and news with family members. This approach, often named ‘web 2.0’, is suitable for users who prefer a web-based experience over using a software program. Special genealogy technologies found only on MyHeritage (both the website and the software) include face recognition technology that helps you tag people in photos and recognize unidentified people; and tree-linking technology called Smart Matching that can connect your family tree to more than 1.5 million other trees on MyHeritage. Smart Matching helps you enlarge your family tree and find new relatives and ancestors. Also on MyHeritage.com is an extensive genealogy search engine that searches more than 1,500 online genealogy databases.

www.familysearch.org

Family Search is run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, otherwise known as the LDS Church. The Church has been gathering and preserving genealogical records from around the world for over 100 years. You can either upload a GEDCOM file of your family tree from your computer onto their website so that it can be viewed by other researchers when they search the website’s collection of ancestral files, or you can download free Personal Ancestral File (PAF) software from the website and save your tree on your computer as a PAF file. PAF software allows you to enter information about each person’s birth, baptism, marriage, death, notes about the sources you have found, and photographs that can be used to form a scrapbook. You can view your family tree in Family View, which shows you a person’s immediate family, in Pedigree View, which displays the direct line in a diagram working from left to right, or in Individual View, which lists each person in your tree and their birth details.

Setting Your Goals

Having drawn up your family tree, you are ready to begin the next phase of your work – setting your research goals, and then working out which archive or resource you are going to use to achieve those goals. To do this, you must first take a long, hard look at all the information you’ve collected – not just the family tree, but the anecdotes, stories, objects and artefacts – and decide what to tackle first.

HOW TO …

… make your family tree

1. If drawing a tree by hand, only use ink when you are sure of a fact, having verified it with official documentation such as a birth, marriage or death certificate

2. Write information you are unsure of in pencil, and leave a question mark against dubious dates or names so that you know further research is required

3. Use your family tree to shape your research plan. Focus on the areas where you want to work further back in time, or are not sure of information you’ve been told

4. Put a date on your family tree each time you revise it, and where possible create a new version each time you’ve discovered something new – either a new file name if you are working online or with a software package, or draw up an amended tree by hand. That way, you can always go back to an earlier version if you’ve made an error

5. Keep a clean master copy of your family tree, but make copies of sections of it to take into the archives with you. That way you can focus on one branch of the family at a time, which will help avoid confusion

6. Once you are more familiar with the practice of compiling your family tree, use a software package to help keep all your notes together. You can add photos, video and audio clips, images of documents and biographical notes to bring the tree to life, depending on the package you have chosen

7. Think about adding your family tree to one of the various online communities that link your data to that of other users. You may find that someone has already done the work for you – though beware of simply accepting non-verified data at face value

Step One: Verify Your Data

Although there are no rights and wrongs, it is strongly advisable to begin by verifying the biographical data you’ve collected through your initial investigation within the family. This will mean ordering duplicate birth, marriage and death certificates where there are gaps in your immediate family tree – if you are not certain of Great-granny Doris’s date of birth, or when your grandparents were married. The good news is that much of this verification process can take place from the comfort of your own home, armed only with a PC and a credit card. As you will find in Section Two, many of the key archive resources (lists of birth, marriages and death, census returns, etc.) are available online; Chapter 4 explains how best to use the Internet during these early stages of your research work.

It is vitally important that you know about more traditional ways of finding biographical information, particularly since a large amount will be stored in archives around the country and may not be available online. You will need to learn how to spot important clues from civil registration (birth, marriage and death certificates) documents (for example, that Great-granddad was a soldier when he got married in 1914); to work out whether there are any relevant documents associated with those clues (there are some army service papers for the First World War, 1914–18); establish where the documents are kept (although some documents can be found online, at www.ancestry.co.uk, the bulk are stored at The National Archives); and then visit the institutions in person, which can be a daunting experience if it’s your first time. Consequently Chapter 3 goes through each step of this process and describes the different types of archive that are available. (This is essential reading if you are to make the most of the remainder of this book, particularly Section Three where the topics – military connections, immigration and emigration, social history, occupations and family secrets – cover material that is rarely available online.)

Step Two: Working Further Back

Having verified the initial data by using civil registration documents as far back as possible – they go back to 1837 in England and Wales, 1855 in Scotland and 1864 in Ireland – most people decide to follow one line of their family further back in time, looking for new ancestors based on the information they’ve found from these certificates. Once again, the key steps you’ll need to take when tracing an ancestor who was born prior to (say) 1837 are covered in more detail in Section Two, where you’ll start to work with some of the key sources aside from certificates, such as census returns, wills and parish registers. Essentially, this process means that you’ll be adding new branches to your family tree. Although there’s a temptation to jump in and tackle all lines at once, it is usually sensible to focus on one branch at a time, particularly if they have a more unusual surname which will make them easier to trace – you’ll have more success tracking down Jeremiah Sandwick than John Smith, for example. Once you’ve got into the swing of things, you can then speed up your research and look at more than one line at a time.

‘It is usually sensible to focus on one branch of your family at a time, particularly if they have a more unusual surname which will make them easier to trace.’

Step Three: Focusing On One Story

Some of the more enterprising among you may decide to focus on one particular family story, which will involve more specialized research in an archive or institution. Depending on the story that you choose to investigate, the period of history in question or geographical location, you will almost certainly have to tackle more complicated archives or record offices. For example, you might want to set out on the elusive tale of your great-grandfather’s period of service during the Boer War, or the intriguing story that – somewhere – there’s a link to royalty waiting to be uncovered. This will almost certainly involve far more complex lines of research, documents that are less familiar or easy to get hold of, and more sources of frustration if you haven’t covered the research basics (certificates, census data, etc.) beforehand. Advice about working in archives is provided in the next chapter, and in particular how to set about locating the relevant archive for the topic of your choice. The more common family history topics, once the basic processes of verification and tree extension are done, are elaborated upon in Section Three.

HOW TO …

… start to plan your research using your family tree as a guide

1. Note all the ancestors for whom you need to verify key biographical data, and work out which documents you need for each

2. Identify one line of the family that you want to work on first

3. Extend that line back a couple of generations, updating your family tree as you go

4. As you gain confidence, repeat the process for other branches of the family

5. Turn to Chapter 3 to learn about which archives you’ll need to visit, and which sources to use first

Set a Budget

There is a cost involved in undertaking a genealogy project, and before deciding which step to take you should consider how much you can afford to spend obtaining information. Travelling to archives, ordering certificates, buying copies of wills, paying for photocopies and signing up to subscriptions for commercial genealogy websites are all a necessary part of the process, but they do all cost money. Nevertheless, if you have planned thoroughly and are careful not to make mistakes (though some are inevitable!) you can avoid unnecessary expense. For example, you should exhaust the resources of any local archive, study centre or near-by family history centre, where you’ll find plenty of material that’s also contained in a national institution that may be further away. Many local libraries also have free subscriptions to genealogy websites, The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and The Times online, which you can use from home if you obtain a library card and PIN number from your library.

Also, when ordering certificates it pays to be patient. By ordering one certificate at a time and waiting for that to arrive to see if the information is correct before ordering the next certificate, you won’t waste money pursuing red herrings and false leads.

CHAPTER 3
Working in Archives

This chapter explains how you can make your first foray into the world of record offices, archives, museums, libraries and other research institutions in the hunt for information. You will learn what sort of information exists out there, and how to use it to extract more names and dates, and to flesh out historical information about your ancestors; what an archive is, and how you locate the most relevant one for your initial research; how to work in an archive; and how to organize your research notes.

One of the few drawbacks of making a show such as Who Do You Think You Are? is that there simply isn’t enough screen time to show all the work that takes place to put together the stories that you see. The actual research takes place behind the scenes over several months – exactly the same work you’ll be doing yourself, although you will be able to take as much time as you like.

Once you have read through this chapter, and the research tips and hints in Chapter 4, you should be fully prepared to tackle the next stage of your research with confidence – in which case you can then head to the chapters in Section Two to learn more about how you can trace your family tree further back in time. An introduction to some of the major national archives and institutions can be found in Section Five.

Gathering Evidence

As outlined in the previous chapter, the route most beginners take is to verify their initial findings, and then take one branch of the family further back in time, generation by generation. To do this, you’ll need to use sources outside the family (although you may well have come across some of this material already in the form of certificates, wills and other paperwork tucked away in boxes, drawers and folders). Once these extensions to the family tree have been made, you will be able to put flesh on the bones, so to speak, by using more advanced research techniques to find evidence that puts the lives of your ancestors into an historical context.

SUMMARY

Primary sources consist of:

• Contemporary documents, such as diaries, letters, photographs, wills and other legal and financial documents

• Birth, marriage and death certificates

• Oral accounts by people who were there

Secondary sources consist of:

• Accounts written by third parties after the event

• History books

• Stories passed down within families over the years

Locating this evidence to build a family tree, learn more about these relatives and support the stories that are passed down through generations are the core tasks of a genealogist, so it’s time to focus on what material you are going to use to achieve these goals, and where to find it. Roughly speaking, there are two main types of record you’ll encounter during your work – primary sources and secondary sources.

Primary sources come in many shapes and forms, such as contemporary documents that survive from the period, or even oral accounts that are told to you by people who were present at an event. Of most use are officially created sources, such as birth, marriage and death certificates, as their creation and content have been governed and directed by legally binding requirements. These can be more reliable as evidence than personal documents like diaries, which are open to artistic licence and subjective opinion. Official sources are only as reliable as the people filling them in, however, and it is not uncommon for ancestors to ‘forget’ important details, or deliberately provide misleading information. The lesson here is never to take anything at face value.

Secondary sources are accounts written retrospectively by people who were not present, but may have had access to primary material, and as such can be subject to errors. Examples are history books written about a major event, such as the Boer War or life in a workhouse. While secondary sources will play a part in your research, you should always endeavour to locate primary evidence to back up your suspicions and findings. Stories passed down through the generations also fall into the secondary source category, unless the story-teller was actually present at the event.

SUMMARY

The archival pyramid:

National and specialist collections

Municipal or county archives (area administrative records)

Local studies centres (general material)

Your initial investigations within your family will have already generated both primary evidence, in the form of documents, photos and letters found around the house, and secondary material from relatives in the form of anecdotes told to them by their ancestors. The next task is to find additional primary and secondary material to extend your family tree. Once this is done, you can then proceed to a wider search for information that will place your relatives in their historical context. It is time to turn to record offices, libraries and museums.

Where to Look for Evidence: Archives, Record Offices, Libraries and Museums
What is an Archive?

The majority of primary material will be housed in record offices, libraries and museums, scattered across Britain – or, if your ancestors came from overseas, all around the world. Many people loosely refer to these institutions as ‘archives’. Although this isn’t the place for academic debate, in technical terms an archive is actually a collection of documents, manuscripts or other primary evidence, although the term is more often used to describe the building or institution in which the collection is housed. It is in this context that the word ‘archive’ will be used in this book.

For those of you who have never been to an archive before, it can be a daunting experience, but one well worth undertaking. Each archive is unique, will hold a different variety of records, and will have its own way of collecting, storing, cataloguing and indexing its records. Bearing in mind that information about your ancestors could turn up anywhere, the first step of your research strategy should be to work out which archives are going to be of most use to you first. The following notes should help you do this, but don’t forget that you will probably need to visit more than one archive over the course of your research, and will often have to return to the same archive many times.

Local Studies Centres

There is a rough hierarchy to archives, ranging from general material held at local studies centres, via the administrative records of a municipal area or county, to national and specialist collections. It is advisable to start at the bottom of this archival pyramid first, and begin by looking for information at a local studies centre. These are often located in a local library, and hold records relating to the immediate area, which may cover a few towns and villages, or all the places situated within a borough. These records can include newspaper collections, rate books, electoral registers, trade directories, photographic material and private family papers deposited by local gentry, as well as maps and plans of the area. You will also find secondary sources here, such as histories of the local area, and if you are really lucky you may also find national collections – indexes to birth, marriage and death certificates, or census returns – on microfilm or microfiche.

The amount of material held varies greatly from one local studies centre to another. Some hold vast amounts of primary material while others are less well stocked. Therefore it is worthwhile contacting your local studies centre beforehand to enquire exactly what type of records they hold. If your ancestors did not live locally to where you now live, you will need to visit a local studies centre near the place they were from. Geography is very important to pinpoint the archives you need to visit.

‘If your ancestors did not live locally to where you now live, you will need to visit a local studies centre near the place they were from.’

Family History Centres

If you do not have a local studies centre in your area, then you may want to see if the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS) have set up a Family History Centre in the vicinity. The LDS Church is an American organization founded by the Mormons in Utah. It has been collecting genealogical records from around the world for the last century, depositing them at its Family History Library in Salt Lake City. There are many Family History Centres around the British Isles and the rest of the world where duplicate copies of many of their central records are held, ranging from parish registers to ancestral files deposited by other researchers. You can find your local Family History Centre from the www.familysearch.org website by entering a country of interest in the Find a Family History Centre Near Your Home search box and then scrolling through the alphabetical list of places for that country.

County Archives

In the hierarchical structure of archives, county record offices (CROs) are the next port of call. As the title suggests, a county record office is a central repository for administrative documents relating to the county, and each county has at least one. (Some have more than one, like Devon, which has three; the Devon Record Office in Exeter, the North Devon Record Office in Barnstaple and the Plymouth and West Devon Record Office in Plymouth.)

In general, most CROs hold census returns, rate books, electoral registers, trade directories, photos and prints, local government documents, maps, parish registers, civil registration indexes, private company and family papers and local history books for every place within the county (rather than just a few towns and villages covered by a local studies centre). In some cases a CRO will store duplicate copies of material held by local study centres, but in other areas the two types of repository will hold completely different sets of records on any given place within that county. It is always worth visiting the local studies centre and the CRO for the area in which you are researching, because there is bound to be at least something extra you will find in the CRO.

Of particular importance are the records deposited by locally important families, who historically would have owned much of the land within the county and therefore played an important part in your ancestors’ lives. Their estate records, rent books, employment accounts, correspondence and records as local justices of the peace will contain thousands of names, many of which may be relevant to you and your search. However, it’s worth remembering that especially wealthy families owned land in more than one county – so if you can’t find what you are looking for in one CRO, it might be worth checking to see if important family papers for principal landowners are deposited elsewhere, possibly in another county where they had their main residence.

If your ancestors lived on the border of a county you should investigate whether the county borders have changed at any time. For example, Bredon’s Hardwick, now in Gloucestershire, was for many centuries described as being in Worcestershire. As a result, some records for people who have lived in Bredon’s Hardwick are located in Worcestershire Record Office, while other records are held in the Gloucestershire Archives. Equally, if your ancestors lived on the border of one or more counties they may have moved around and spent time living on both sides of the boundary at various times, in which case there is probably material about them to be found in the record offices for both those counties.

Municipal Archives

It is also worth considering the collections of major cities, which are often stored in their own municipal record offices or archives. Many places have more than one institution for you to visit. For example, London is served by the London Metropolitan Archives, the Corporation of London Record Office and the Guildhall Library, each of which holds important historical and genealogical information.

National Archives

Each country in the British Isles has its own national archive where documents concerning central government are deposited. These are:

• The National Archives (TNA) based in Kew in West London, covering England, Wales and the UK

• The National Archives of Scotland (NAS) at Edinburgh

• The National Archives of Ireland, based in Dublin

• The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) in Belfast

There are also major collections relating to Wales at the National Library of Wales (NLW). Descriptions of each institution are provided in Section Five.

The holdings of each of these archives are not strictly determined by geography. If your ancestors lived outside England then you may still need to visit The National Archives at Kew as well as the particular country’s national archive, as the centralization of administrative records to London has affected all of the countries at some point in time. A change in the location of government does not always mean historic archives have moved to that new location. Each country also has a central General Register Office from which family historians order duplicate copies of birth, marriage and death certificates (see Section Two). The advice provided in Section Three relating to specific topics of family history will explain when you will need to visit each of the national archives, and what records you should use when you arrive.

Specialist Genealogical Libraries

There are other centralized archives that hold some documents that are not accessible at the above-mentioned national and regional archives, as well as duplicate copies of those that are. The Society of Genealogists based in central London has copies of many parish registers from county record offices around the UK, as well as indexes to records held in other archives, documents relating to people around the British Empire, and much more.

Libraries

It is also worth visiting your local library as well as an archive. Not only will many libraries play host to your nearest local studies centre, many have now opened specialist family history services, given the popularity of the subject these days. Furthermore, many libraries hold important manuscript collections that are worth visiting in their own right, as well as important reference works that will play a crucial part in shaping your knowledge of how and where your ancestors lived. This is especially true at national level. The British Library in St Pancras, London, contains a copy of most books that have ever been published, but – as you will discover in Section Three – it also has a collection of genealogy records for people who lived in the British Empire, including records of baptism, marriage and burial in India. There are similar national libraries for Scotland (in Edinburgh), Wales (Aberystwyth), the Republic of Ireland (Dublin) and Northern Ireland (Belfast). Many academic libraries also hold important collections of primary evidence.

Museums

Finally, do not forget to visit museums, both specialist – such as the National Railway Museum or National Coal Mining Museum (both featured in Who Do You Think You Are? when Sue Johnston and Lesley Garrett went looking for their ancestors) – and local, such as the Rochdale Museum where much research into Bill Oddie’s ancestors took place. Museums will be full not only of documents, but objects, artefacts, clothes, engines, machinery, books, sporting memorabilia – anything from the past that shows what life was like for your ancestors. This is where you will finally begin to understand the era in which your relatives lived, to encounter history up close, and find out about some of the events they lived through.

Museums can also help you to identify some of the bits and pieces you’ve found during your own research within the family. Items of clothing or household objects can be taken to local museums or national ones such as the Victoria and Albert Museum (for clothing and textiles especially), where curators can help you date them. Military memorabilia such as medals can often be interpreted at places such as the Imperial War Museum.

How to Find an Archive

There are various online databases to help you find libraries, archives, record offices, museums and repositories around the UK, and even around the world. Most of these allow you to enter the name of a place or use an interactive map to display a list of all the nearest archives to a particular area. The ARCHON Directory is perhaps one of the most useful databases to start with, and it’s available from The National Archives website at www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ archon. It contains addresses, telephone numbers, websites and street maps for local and major repositories all over the UK, the Republic of Ireland, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, and you can search by region or by entering the name of the place in which you’re interested. Visit the Scottish Archive Network (SCAN) at www.scan.org.uk/directory/index. htm to find an additional alphabetical directory of Scottish archives.

If, as outlined earlier, you want to find out where the principal records of a particular landowning family are kept, the best way is to search the National Register of Archives, now part of The National Archives. You can view their paper indexes in person at their main search room at Kew, but a quicker route is to key the name of the landowning family into their online database at www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/nra and click on ‘Family Name’. You will then be given a list of all archives holding relevant material. So if you were looking for a connection to the Marquess of Sligo, as actor John Hurt was, you could type in ‘Sligo’ and quickly learn that relevant records were stored in the National Library of Ireland.

Working in Archives

To recap, your next step after building your family tree is to verify the information you’ve got. Then you can extend the tree further back in time and, by following a particular branch of the family or story, investigate the historical context. You can start the verification process and extend your family tree online by obtaining certificates, census returns, wills and parish registers, as described in Section Two; but you may find it easier to simply visit the local studies centre or county record office in the area your family comes from to look at paper or microfiche indexes for these certificates and records, many of which are not available on the Internet. In any case, you will certainly need to visit an archive sooner or later to add historical context, so here are some important points to know before you do venture inside.

Step One: Preparing for Your Visit

If you are unfamiliar with working in an archive, here’s a checklist of things to do before you visit. Never just turn up unannounced – it’s a sure way to have a frustrating day.

Make Contact

The best thing you can do is to make contact with the archive you plan to visit. Call them, email them or write to them. The archivists there can tell you all about the place, demystify the process of registering as a user (or ‘reader’), explain how to search for records, both onsite and online, and – provided you ask simple, detailed and focused questions – may even be able to give specific advice to help you find what you’re looking for. If this is the case, you can always ask to talk to the person that helped you when you do eventually visit in person, if they are around and are not tied up with other duties. Don’t forget, you can find the archive nearest to you through ARCHON, mentioned above. If in doubt, contact the local studies centre for further advice.

Book a Seat

Family history is big business these days, and unprecedented numbers are flocking into archives as never before. Many institutions are fairly small, with limitations on the amount of space available for researchers, particularly as many of the most popular records are only available on microfilm or microfiche. It is therefore important to check whether you need to book a seat before you visit, otherwise you may be disappointed if you simply turn up on the day.

Registration and Identification

Most archives require you to register as a user before you can view original material or use their search rooms. Usually, you are requested to produce at least one form of official identification, although these requirements will vary from archive to archive. The National Archives asks for one form of official ID, such as a bank card, driving licence, passport, or national ID card for overseas visitors, and then issues a three-year reader’s ticket which incorporates your photo, taken on the day you apply. Many county archives also need to see proof of address, and some request passport photos for their records. However, a large number of county record offices have grouped together to form CARN – the County Archive Research Network – and registration at one affiliated archive gives you access to all participating members.

Location and Travel

It is not always evident where an archive is likely to be located. Many form part of council or municipal buildings; some are newly built, just out of town; others may have no parking facilities, or don’t have good links to public transport. Luckily, the majority of archives now maintain websites, and provide maps or necessary travel details.

HOW TO …

… prepare for an archive visit

1. Make contact in advance

2. Book a seat

3. Check ID requirements for registration

4. Check location and travel details

5. Find out the opening hours

6. Make sure you can access the records you want

7. Check costs and facilities

Opening Hours

There is no standard pattern to archival opening hours, so don’t assume that it will be open when you want to visit. Although many open 9–5, five days a week, some now close for at least one day midweek and offer either Saturday opening, or one late evening, or both. There is usually at least one period each year when an archive closes down for ‘stocktaking’, when checks are carried out to ensure none of the precious material they hold has gone missing.

Access

It is also dangerous to assume you can simply turn up and expect to see the material you need. Since there are pressures on storage space, many of the less popular documents in large archives are often kept offsite, which means you may not always be able to view material on the day you plan to visit unless you’ve made prior arrangements. In addition to storage restrictions, there could be other complications. Privately deposited documents – family papers, legal archives or religious collections – often come with their own restrictions. For example, you may need to write to the depositor to secure permission to view material. It is therefore vital to check all these details before you visit to avoid disappointment.

Costs and Facilities

There may be costs involved in visiting an archive. Some charge you an entry fee; others will ask you to leave your goods and belongings in a locker that requires change; and any photocopying you wish to take away with you will have to be paid for. Indeed, you may also want to buy food and drink for lunch and some archives provide snack machines, with larger institutions offering hot drinks, sandwiches or even restaurants.

Step Two: Searching for Documents

Having established which archive you need to visit, and made contact to cover the points listed above, you are ready to search their collections in the hope of finding the key documents you need to supplement your family tree. You should already have set your research goals in advance, but it might be worth writing these out, so you can hand them to the staff at the archive if you need some help. For example, you may have heard that Great-uncle Jeremy fought in the First World War, but don’t know where he served. You may therefore decide to restrict your search to establishing his movements during the war. Try to keep this ‘wish list’ focused and manageable; it is important to be realistic about how much you can get done in a day, and allow time for unexpected discoveries that may lead you into new investigations. Remember, if you don’t have time to complete all you originally wanted to do, you can always resume on a later trip.

Catalogues

Each archive ‘catalogues’ its possessions – that is, it gives a unique reference to every item that it collects. Alongside this unique reference there is usually a description of the item that has been catalogued. These catalogues and document descriptions are the main way that researchers identify documents they need to look at, though you should be aware that archives are complicated places, and there is not one uniform system of cataloguing documents that applies to each institution – each archive will have its own catalogue system, developed over time. Many repositories still have paper indexes to their catalogues, which need to be trawled through in person to find document references even if some of their collections have been uploaded into digital catalogues, although these days many archive catalogues are available to search online.

Amalgamated Catalogues Online

One important project aims to bring all these disparate catalogues and document descriptions together in one place on the Internet. Known as Access to Archives (A2A), it is an online database containing descriptions of over 10 million documents held in around 400 local archives across England and Wales. It aims to increase awareness of these fantastic resources and facilitate easy access to them. You can search the database by keyword, area, date range and repository name by going to www.a2a.org.uk. Full document descriptions are provided along with references and a note as to where each document is held. Many local and county record offices have submitted their catalogues to the A2A database, but it cannot be stressed enough that if you can’t find anything related to your research using A2A you still need to visit the record office itself and consult the original indexes.

The National Register of Archives (NRA) is another treasure trove of catalogue descriptions, but is arranged in a different way to the A2A catalogue. Its database of record descriptions held for around 29,000 businesses, 75,000 organizations, 9,000 families, and 46,000 individuals can be searched using four types of search engine. The NRA database is accessed via The National Archives’ website at www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/nra, where you can search under a corporate name, personal name, family name or place name. This database is fantastic for finding out about the location of company archives and the records they hold, especially if your ancestor worked for a major corporate firm.

The Scottish Archive Network has compiled an online, unified index of documents held in many archives across Scotland, which can be searched by keyword from www.scan.org.uk/catalogue. It has descriptions of over 20,000 documents from 52 archives, including the NAS and NLS.

There is even a network allowing you to search the holdings of university archives and libraries, called Archives Hub. It is being added to over time, and can be found at www.archiveshub.ac.uk.

Important Institutional Catalogues Online

It is always worth finding out if the archive you intend to visit has its own online catalogue accessed via its website. If you have located an archive using the ARCHON database, this should have provided you with their website address. Most of the national archives have separate online catalogues containing descriptions of documents not found on A2A or the NRA.

• The National Archives’ Catalogue has descriptions of an impressive 10 million documents that you can search by keyword, date range or government departmental code from www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/catalogue. The documents held at TNA are categorized according to the government department they originated from, and a departmental code forms the first part of any TNA document reference. For example, WO is the prefix of all document references for records from the War Office. Searching for document descriptions by government departmental code can help to narrow down the number of results you get if you know what type of record you are looking for.

• The National Archives of Scotland has a database known as OPAC (Online Public Access Catalogue) that can be found at www.nas.gov.uk/catalogues/default.asp. This searches their collections by keyword, place authority, name authority and date, and the NAS website has a list of documents that have not yet been uploaded to OPAC and require a search of the original indexes. You could also consult the National Register of Archives for Scotland (NRAS), which is only available in paper form at the National Archives of Scotland and the National Library of Scotland. This is a survey of papers held by private archives in Scotland.

HOW TO …

… search for documents

1. Write down your research goals in advance, and keep them focused and manageable

2. Every item in an archive will have a unique catalogue reference and description

3. Document references will be contained in the archive’s catalogue index

4. Many archive catalogues are available to search online, although some are still only in paper form

5. Online catalogues are available either via the particular repository’s website, or as amalgamated catalogues of documents from local and national archives

• In a similar vein, the National Library of Wales has a full catalogue which can be found on its website www.llgc.org.uk through the ‘Search the Catalogue’ heading. Here books, periodicals, newspapers, maps, graphics, electronic publications and digitized records can be searched by keyword.

• The National Archives of Ireland’s search engine is organized in a slightly different manner, allowing you to search in one go the 19 databases comprised mainly of government departmental records. This is accessed from www.nationalarchives.ie/search but does not cover the entirety of the repository’s collections.

• The Public Records Office of Northern Ireland does not have a complete online catalogue either. There is a limited online index available from www.proni.gov.uk by following the Search the Archives link, where a Geographical Index locates parishes, Poor Law Unions and counties on a map, a Prominent Persons Index finds references for documents relating to individuals, a Presbyterian Church Index and a Church of Ireland Index lists those church records that have been microfilmed, and a Subject Index describes the types of records held at the PRONI.

• The Society of Genealogists, which charges admission for non-members, has its own catalogue known as SOGCAT available from its website www.sog.org.uk/sogcat/access. Here you can search an alphabetical index by parish name, surname or subject to see if they hold copies of the parish registers you are looking for, or records of a particular pedigree you are hoping to find.

Step Three: Working Responsibly in an Archive

Once you have scoured the online catalogues and indexes for all the archives you plan to visit, and have made lists of all the documents that sound useful to your studies, why not see if it is possible to order those documents in advance of your visit? Most of the websites mentioned have clear instructions on how to do this either online or over the phone if they offer an advanced ordering facility. Your next step is to brave your first visit to the archives …

HOW TO …

… work in an archive

1. Only use pencil and a spiral-bound note pad to make notes

2. Don’t eat or drink in the reading room

3. Handle documents as little as possible

4. Respect your fellow researchers: turn mobile phones off and work quietly

5. Laptops and digital cameras are usually allowed, but check with the archivist first

Because the material they hold is unique and irreplaceable, there are rules and regulations that you will have to follow during your visit. Actually, these rules are there to help you make the most of your research trip, as well as protect the documents for other users.

Document preservation and conservation is an important part of archival work, and to ensure that documents are not damaged you will find that archives impose strict rules on what you can bring into the reading rooms with you, plus guidelines on document handling techniques. In general, the golden rule of archives is that you must work with pencils only – biros and pens are forbidden due to the potential harm they can cause to original material. Similarly, erasers and pencil sharpeners should not be used or placed near documents, as they can cause damage. There is usually a no eating or drinking rule in place for similar reasons, and this extends to cough sweets and chewing gum.

If you are unsure about how you should be handling an item, or you feel it is delicate, please ask an archivist to assist you. Most archives have a store of foam wedges, supports and weights to help set the document out in a way that carries a minimum risk of harm. Try to limit your own contact with the item; for example, if reading a line of text, do not run your finger along the document, as grease from your skin can cause damage. Instead, place a piece of white paper under the line of text to help you keep your place. If you are having difficulty reading faded text, ultraviolet lamps can often help pick out lost words. Similarly, maps and plans are often covered under clear protective sheets, and you should always ask before you attempt to trace a document.

The amount of material you can bring into the reading rooms will also be limited. Apart from banning pens, erasers and pencil sharpeners, it is likely that you will be asked to leave the majority of your research notes in a locker outside the reading room area, and bring in only spiral-bound note pads or sheets of paper stapled together; and what you can bring in will be probably searched on the way in and the way out. This is to prevent document theft; sadly, many items ‘go missing’ each year.

Finally, you should, wherever possible, respect your fellow researchers and work in silence. If you do need to confer with a friend or colleague, try to talk quietly and leave the reading room to do so. Mobile phones should be turned off or left in silent mode – there’s nothing more annoying than having your concentration disturbed by someone’s phone ringing! Most archives allow you to bring your laptop into the reading room, but you should also set them up so that they are silent when turned on. Digital cameras are also largely welcomed these days, though you need to obtain clearance first from the archivist if you want to take photos, as there could be copyright implications and not all cameras are ‘document friendly’.

Step Four: Avoiding Potential Pitfalls

Here are a few tips to help you avoid common mistakes, and make the most of the material at your disposal.

Physical Labour

Visiting archives can sometimes be more physically demanding than you might think. The increase in the amount of material that has been digitalized and made available online is gradually changing the process of archival research, but you may still need to spend a proportion of your time on your feet or lifting heavy books and large documents. If you are not very robust you might want to consider taking a friend or relative along to help you out. Many documents are also stored as duplicate copies on microfilm or microfiche, which some people find difficult to read for long periods of time if they have poor eyesight. Many archives are aware of the difficulties faced by elderly visitors or those with special needs to cater for, and have invested in specially designed computers for people with poor eyesight.

It might also be worth considering coming to an archive in old clothes. Many old documents are quite dirty, particularly ancient leather-bound tomes whose spines have decayed to an old, red powder that can make quite a mess on clean, white clothes! You should always wash your hands before and after visiting an archive, as you never know what old microbes you might have picked up from the documents during your visit.

‘It’s not unusual to find variant spellings of the same word, particularly personal and place names, in a single piece of text.’

Latin

If you are fortunate enough to be able to trace the history of your family back before 1733, you may well encounter difficulties interpreting relevant material, as the language of official documents was Latin. So material such as manorial court rolls – a highly important source for a family historian – will need translating, as will any official record of deeds or land transfers that were enrolled in the central courts. The exception to this is the Interregnum period (1649–60), when the Parliamentary regime decreed that all official documents should be written in English, and you will also find that some official documents were written in the English language before 1733.

Reading Old Handwriting

Another potential problem will be that scribes tended to employ abbreviations when recording entries, so you will not necessarily be working from easily identifiable Latin words. Handwriting changed over the ages, and even if a document has been written in English it may be difficult to decipher. Official sources can be easier, as scribal technique – the way someone wrote a document – tended to change more slowly as writers adopted the handwriting of their predecessors. However, private hands varied widely, even within a relatively short period, often employing idiosyncratic shorthand techniques. Spellings also differed widely between authors, and it is not unusual to find variant spellings of the same word, particularly personal and place names, in a single piece of text. All of these problems can make interpreting documents difficult. However, there are ways to make documents seem less intimidating.

Most archives stock Latin dictionaries to help you translate key phrases, whilst there are similar publications to help you understand palaeography, which is the technical term used to describe the handwriting and abbreviations employed in the documents. Furthermore, there are specialist volumes written for family and local historians that provide translations and explanations of the formulae for the most commonly used documents that you will encounter. If you are still unsure, try selecting a similar document from the Interregnum period, which will be in English. Most documents follow standard patterns, with only the details of individuals and places altering. This will enable you to decide where you should be looking in the document for key phrases, and assist with translation. In addition, some local history societies provide transcriptions and translations of important document series, with the added advantage that they are usually indexed. These too can be used to aid interpretation of difficult original material.

Many archives and institutions have created resources online to help you to teach yourself Latin and palaeography. One of the best, since it’s linked to their own documents, is provided for free by The National Archives on their website at www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ palaeography, and there is a site where ancient Scottish handwriting can be demystified at www.scottishhandwriting.com.

Dates

Not everyone is familiar with the way documents are dated. Many dates are given in the form of a Regnal year – the year is described in relation to the date the monarch ascended the throne and the number of years for which they had reigned, rather than the familiar reference to the number of years since the birth of Christ. For example, 20 Henry VIII covers the period 22 April 1528 to 21 April 1529 – the twentieth year of his reign, which began on 22 April 1509. Similarly, a large proportion of legal documentation also incorporates a legal term date – Michaelmas, Hilary, Easter or Trinity – which signifies a particular part of the year in which business was conducted.

HOW TO …

… be prepared for pitfalls

1. Be aware that searching archives can be physically demanding and dirty work

2. Older official records will be in Latin, and often abbreviated Latin at that

3. Handwritten records can be hard to read and spellings can be erratic, especially of names

4. Documents may be dated using Regnal years, legal terms and saints’ days

5. Before 1752, years started in March, not January

6. Always bear in mind a document’s original purpose and context

Furthermore, you may come across dates such as 28 February 1700/01, which refer to the old-style dating technique employed by the Church following the Julian calendar, which started the New Year on 25 March, rather than on 1 January as we do today. The practice was dropped in 1752, the same year that the Gregorian calendar was adopted. The best guide to the many and varied ways of writing dates is Cheney’s Handbook of Dates, which provides tables giving Regnal years, Easter days and saints’ days, which were also used as ways of giving a date.

Context

When looking at the material you have selected, it is very tempting to jump straight in to identify references to your family hidden within the pages. Understandable though this is, given all the procedures you’ve had to go through to get to this stage, it would be a mistake to launch straight in without first checking what you are looking at, and why. Before you can usefully extract information from a document, you will need to understand why that document was created in the first place, how it would have been used, and what message it contained at the time it was written. If you do not do this, then you may be taking the information it contains out of its historical context and therefore run the risk of misinterpreting it. After all, documents were not initially created for the purpose of helping family detectives locate their ancestors in the twenty-first century. The records might not easily lend themselves to modern research techniques – for example, indexes may not survive, or you may need to identify the property where people lived rather than the person themselves. For example, electoral lists are a great way of tracing people’s movements, particularly in the twentieth century; however, they are rarely indexed by surname and so you need to work out their place of residence, for example from a certificate of birth, marriage or death.

Ask yourself why the document was created, and what information it was originally intended to provide. This will allow you to read it in its own context, and thereby understand why it is arranged the way it is. It may therefore be necessary to corroborate the source with one or more others before you can extract useful information from it. Most archives provide information leaflets about documents and why they were created, so set aside some time to read these useful articles so that you fully understand why you need to look at the documents. That way, you will come away with new names to add to your family tree, and a greater understanding of what they did to end up in an historical document.

‘Ask yourself why the document was created, and what information it was originally intended to provide.’

A good example is the search for a relevant death duty register (described in Chapter 8). Initially, they were created to provide information about the estate of a deceased person so that tax could be levied; but family historians now use them to track down the place where the will was registered, or to obtain further information about some of the beneficiaries in the will. At first glance, the notation used in the death duty register can be confusing or hard to read. Closer inspection, coupled with information contained in the accompanying research guide provided by The National Archives (where the records are stored) makes it easier to decipher the content of the document and allows you to extract the necessary data from the various sections of the register. This can then be used to find the will, and work out where some of the beneficiaries named in the will were living.

General Organization

When you start working in an archive for the first time, you’ll need to be properly prepared. As well as following the above steps to locate an archive, locate documents within the archive, and ensure you interpret them correctly, you will also need to devote some time to the way you record and write up your findings. Here are some tips to help you.

Note Taking

Good note taking is an essential part of your research. If you spend a whole day in an archive, you could be wasting your time if you do not bother to record the exact searches you did, which indexes you looked at, the references of the documents you examined, what information these documents contained, and the names of any books you took copies from. You will find that the next time you go to the archives you will more than likely end up redoing searches you have already conducted simply because you cannot be sure whether you have done them or not.

‘Good note taking is an essential part of your research. Record the exact searches you did, which indexes you looked at, the document catalogue references and the information those documents contained.’

You should establish a way of recording the parish register, civil registration and probate searches you have completed so that you know exactly which parishes, years and quarters you have looked at in case you need to extend these searches at a later date. Decide on a note-taking system that works for you. Most people use abbreviations for the terms that are repeated often throughout their work. You will probably find the abbreviations used in many family trees (see Chapter 2) are handy to learn. However, consistency in the way you write your notes is important so as not to confuse yourself. For example, if you start using ‘b.’ to indicate ‘born’, you should then decide on another abbreviation for ‘baptized’ and ‘buried’ – don’t use ‘b.’ for all three as you will soon get confused!

Some people prefer to take a laptop with them to the archives so they can type their notes straight into electronic form. But there will be occasions when a laptop will not be allowed in certain areas of an archive, so be prepared for this. You should always have a set of notes, whether written or electronic, which you can take into the archives with you to work from. Keep hold of your research plans and ensure you record how much of it you achieved so that you know how much you need to do on your next visit. Date your notes so that you can keep a chronological track of your progress and can work from the most recent set of notes, and record the name of the archive you visited to avoid confusion, just in case two archives use a similar referencing system for their documents.

When you are taking notes it is important to record the source of absolutely everything, whether it is a person, an archive, a website or a book. When writing document references be sure to include the exact page and folio numbers where you found the correct entry so that you can find it again easily if you need to, even the line on which it was written. If you consult a document that turns out to be of no use, make a note of this so that you do not go back to it again.

Secondary sources also contain valuable information for family historians, so when you take a photocopy from a book or write out a paragraph from it, record its full title, the author’s name, the publisher and year of publication, which should be found on the inside cover, as well as the relevant page numbers. Recording the year of publication for books will be surprisingly useful to your research. You may find a fascinating paragraph in a local history book describing the house your ancestors used to live in, but if you don’t bother to look at when the book was published you won’t be able to put that description into its own historical context. Many history books were published in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a lot of which are still in our libraries today, and their descriptions of events and places will differ from those of more recent authors.

‘It is important to distinguish between evidence and analysis in your notes, otherwise mistakes will start to creep into your work.’

It is important that your notes distinguish between what is evidence and what is analysis. When you return to your notes at a later time, perhaps to type them up or to remind yourself what you found on your last visit to the archives, you need to be able to rely on them. Therefore, if you transcribe a passage from an original document, put that paragraph in speech marks so you know that was what was written word-for-word. If there are any phrases you are unsure of put them in square brackets, because assuming the meaning of a few words could alter the entire context of a piece of text. Anything you have scribbled down as presumption, analysis or ideas should be labelled clearly as being so, because these opinions may change as you find more documents. You want to avoid confusing fact with ideas, otherwise mistakes will start to creep into your work.

Filing

A genealogy project produces an enormous amount of paperwork, from your research notes and photocopied documents to the photographs you find and the family papers your relatives give you. Sooner rather than later you will undoubtedly find that you don’t know what to do with it all! It is very tempting to just pile it all into a big box and hide it under the bed, but that would be a huge shame after all your hard work, not to mention that it makes finding documents and notes you need to work from a bit of a nightmare.

There are various filing systems you can adapt to suit your own purposes. It is worth investing in a decent expandable file with plenty of dividers and labels. And you may prefer to showcase some key documents in a portfolio file to keep them pristine. There are many ways of organizing your paperwork. You might want to classify your notes alphabetically by surname, or perhaps keep all the notes from one archive visit together, but it does help to keep copies of original documents together with the relevant notes. It can be useful to separate your notes for each side of the family, and then by surname and branch, especially if the same surname appears in two different branches.

If you are looking after original documents on behalf of your family, it is important to keep them away from heat, damp and direct light to prevent them from deteriorating. Where possible original documents, particularly photographs, should be stored in strong, acid-free boxes, but if you do decide to keep them in a plastic folder with the rest of your notes, you should place each document inside two thin sheets of acid-free paper to prevent the plastic from damaging them. There are companies that advertise in family history magazines or that can be found online who specialize in products that preserve fragile documents for family historians. If you are unsure, have a chat with your nearest archivist for further advice.

If you have a computer, you may want to consider typing up your notes so that you can create a new folder for each surname. It does help to keep the paper copies of your notes, though, in case you need to take them with you on a future visit to an archive. If you do opt for keeping an electronic record of your research, it’s handy to have one central document that compiles all of your notes, with references to where each piece of information comes from.

There is a multitude of genealogy software packages on the market with the aim of making this easy to do. They also enable you to organize the data you enter into different styles of family trees, charts, reports and indexes, which is almost impossible to do if you are just using a word-processing package. If you choose the right type of genealogy software, you will find that you can not only use it to store all your research, including a fact file of each individual linked up with images of photos and documents, audio recordings of interviews with family members, family holiday videos, and notes about the sources you have found, but you can simultaneously do some of your research online by connecting to genealogy websites that are compatible with your chosen software and migrate the online records you find into your family file. Don’t be scared to invest in a package to play around with, and learn how to get the most out of it as you go along.

CHAPTER 4
Research Tips and Hints

The tips, hints and advice in this chapter will help you to achieve far more when you actually start looking for documents, and to make the most of your time in archives and research institutions. We also introduce the amazing array of resources now available online, give some advice about the pitfalls of Internet research, and what to do when you get stuck with your research and need a little shove in the right direction.

However, before you start worrying about where to look for help, here are a few useful tips to help you avoid making mistakes in the first place!

Avoiding Mistakes Early On

There is nothing more exasperating than spending several hours in an archive and a small fortune on certificates only to realize you’ve been following the wrong branch of people, simply because a small mistake was made early on. This can easily happen if you don’t order every registration certificate for a person and ensure each name, date, place and occupation on your family tree is substantiated with as much documentation as possible.

Never Assume …

Cross-referencing sources is essential, but if you cannot find conclusive evidence then do not just assume that links to earlier generations are correct, even if they look likely. Just because the name and date appear to be right doesn’t mean you’ve found the right person.

CASE EXAMPLE

Question the evidence

When researching Ian Hislop’s family tree, two people called Murdo Matheson were found living at the same time, in the same place, and who joined the same regiment in the late eighteenth century. Painstaking research was required to work out which Murdo Matheson was related to Ian, only solved by comparing the clasps on a medal awarded to Ian’s relative, which had been passed down through the family, with the movements of each battalion and therefore eliminating the ‘wrong’ one.

If you have run into problems, leave that branch for the time being and keep pushing back on neighbouring branches that might give you more clues. For example, it is possible to link witnesses’ names on a marriage certificate to family members who appear on earlier census returns to strengthen the case that you have found the right person, and therefore help you to fit the jigsaw together.

Where possible try to locate more than one source to corroborate information you have already found. If you discover that there is no concrete evidence whatsoever to verify a link, make a list of all the circumstantial evidence that led you to your initial assumption, and continue forward, making a note that you have not found firm supporting documentation.

‘Try to locate more than one source to corroborate information you have already found.’

Question the Evidence

You should always question the reliability, or at the very least the historical context, of every document you encounter. Primary evidence can contain errors, but if you have enough different sources available so that you can compare the vital details for each ancestor, then you should be able to work out which sources are accurate by a process of elimination. For example, census returns can sometimes give the wrong ages and can contain misspellings if names have been inaccurately transcribed from the original forms. Death certificates are also known to contain mistakes, especially if a young and distant relative, or doctor who was unsure of the facts, registered the death.

Our ancestors were prone to stretching the truth when asked about their age, or were themselves unsure of their own year of birth in times when paperwork and the process of filling out forms was far less common than it is today, which can explain discrepancies between a birth certificate and an age given on the same person’s marriage certificate. Any evidence of our ancestor’s existence is important, but you should be cautious when using this evidence.

Concentrate!

Simple mistakes are easy to avoid just by staying focused and alert. Keep checking the exact spelling of the names you are searching for so that you don’t waste half an hour looking for the birth of James John Clark, when it should have been John James Clarke. And it might sound obvious, but you’d be surprised how easy it is to confuse the marriage indexes for the birth indexes, so always double-check you are looking at the right set of documents.

HOW TO …

… avoid annoying mistakes

1. Double-check each fact; don’t assume it is right

2. Corroborate each source with another if possible

3. Beware! Primary documents contain mistakes

4. Double-check name spellings

Has Your Tree Been Researched Before?

Don’t be afraid to look for short cuts – they can save you enormous amounts of time and money! Here are a few places you can investigate to see if someone has done some work on your family tree already.

Society of Genealogists

Part of your initial research should include checking whether any part of your family tree has already been published or recorded. One of the best places to start looking is the Society of Genealogists (SoG), one of the country’s premium research institutions. The SoG is based in Clerkenwell, London, and for an annual fee you can access its impressive research library as well as copies of key datasets, attend lectures, seminars and workshops, and examine their extensive collection of manuscripts. Further information about the SoG can be found from their website, www.sog.org.uk.

Among the SoG’s records are pre-researched family trees, pedigrees and associated research notes left by family historians in the past who wanted to share their work with others. You check the SoG’s online catalogue at www.sog.org.uk/sogcat/access to see if your surname is listed. And don’t forget, it is also worth asking at your local studies centre or county record office to see whether they have copies of pedigrees deposited by other local researchers.

‘It’s worth asking at your local studies centre or county record office to see if they have copies of pedigrees deposited by other local researchers.’

Published Pedigrees

If you suspect – or even know – that you have blue-blooded relatives, then one of the volumes that publish pedigrees of the aristocracy will be of use. Surprisingly, this is more likely than it sounds, given that many aristocratic families can trace their lineage back hundreds of years, and as each new generation is born, the distribution of wealth and status thins out among the younger branches. You may not realize at the start of your journey that one branch has noble roots, in which case it will probably not become apparent until you have been investigating your genealogy for a while.

Alternatively, if there is a family story that a certain ancestor was descended from a specific duke or lord, then it is worth tracking down the pedigree of that family to see if it could link in with your own research at some point in time. Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage and Burke’s Landed Gentry have recorded the genealogies of titled and landed families throughout the United Kingdom and Ireland for over 175 years. Their content includes information on the extended family and deceased distant relatives of each noble name. Debrett’s Peerage and Baronetage has been published since 1802, and is sometimes considered to be more dependable because it does not rely so heavily on information obtained from the family in the way Burke’s does. On the other hand, Debrett’s contains far less information about extended branches, preferring to concentrate on direct ancestors, descendants and living relatives.

Both publications are regularly updated and most libraries and archives have copies of these volumes, which include editions detailing the ancestry of extinct titles as well. Alternatively, you can purchase a subscription to browse the database of entries in Burke’s from the website www.burkespeerage.com. If you do manage to trace a line of your tree back to a titled family, then you can also look them up in The Complete Peerage by George Edward Cokayne, copies of which are held on open shelves at the National Archives in Kew and at other notable research centres. The Complete Peerage cites all of its sources and gives a bit of background about some of the more distinguished characters, such as their involvement in certain battles; however, it only follows the direct line of heirs.

In addition to the popular pedigree publications mentioned above, there are plenty of other editors who have printed pedigrees throughout the last few centuries, although these volumes are generally less well known because they are no longer in print. Check the shelves of your local library and archives for these. You may also find that a local historian has published genealogical records for families who lived in your local area.

There are some indexes to published pedigrees arranged by surname so that you can locate the relevant books that may contain information about your family tree. These are:

• The Genealogist’s Guide by G.W. Marshall of 1903; indexes a large number of pedigrees published between 1879 and 1903

• A Genealogical Guide by J.B. Whitmore, published in 1953; continues this cataloguing for pedigrees published between 1900 and 1950

• The Genealogist’s Guide by G.B. Barrow, published in 1977; for pedigrees published between 1950 and 1975

• A Catalogue of British Family Histories by T.R. Thomson; the most recent index for pedigrees, published between 1975 and 1980

It is highly worthwhile consulting these indexes for all of the surnames in your family tree, and continually referring to them as you find new names. Copies are held at most major libraries and archives.

College of Arms

The College of Arms, located in central London, has records of the visitations conducted by royal heralds in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They were sent out by the Crown to review the claims of families whose status gave them rights to bear a coat of arms each time a new generation was born. (This need to check the family trees of the nobility became increasingly important after the English Civil War, 1642–46, at which time illegitimate claims were made to some titles.) Heraldry, or the system of displaying personal symbols on shields such as coats of arms, is of great use to family historians because of its hereditary nature. Heralds kept pedigrees of the families that were entitled to bear coats of arms so that they had a record of the line of descent the coat of arms could be passed down, which was usually to the male heir. Since the cessation of heraldic visitations, the College of Arms has been responsible for issuing coats of arms and holds updated copies of pedigrees for many distinguished families from around the British Isles. You can visit their website at www.college-of-arms.gov.uk to find out more about their history and the services they provide.

The College of Arms’ records can only be searched by members of staff, who are still known as heralds today. However, Frederick Arthur Crisp and Joseph J. Howard published a series of pedigrees based on the heralds’ visitations that include twentieth-century descendants, entitled Visitation of England and Wales and Visitation of Ireland. In addition, in 1952 Sir Anthony Richard Wagner released The Records and Collections of the College of Arms, which may be worth consulting if you believe a branch of your family may have been entitled to bear a coat of arms at one time.

Online Pedigrees

For those of us who are not so lucky as to have had our family history already published, it is worth scouring the many genealogy websites that enable researchers to share their family trees online. As has been explained in Chapter 2, there are many websites where you can upload your tree as you go along, including www.genesreunited.co.uk, www.ancestry.co.uk and www.myheritage.com, so why not use these resources to find out if there is somebody else out there looking for some of the same ancestors as you? Many of these sites allow you to search their database of records for free simply by entering the name of a particular ancestor you would like to find. Usually you will be provided with a limited amount of detail about all the people in the database that match your criteria, and if you subscribe to the website you can email other users who seem to be researching the same people to ask their permission to view their research in full. Some websites provide free access to other people’s online pedigrees, such as http://familysearch.org and www.genealogy.com.

Guild of One-Name Studies

The Guild of One-Name Studies is an organization that supports researchers keen to investigate the origin of a particular surname. Its members are interested in everybody who has the surname they are studying, though they might restrict their study to a certain geographical area, which means they are not looking at one particular pedigree. Nevertheless, their records sometimes include lineages of many families. Visit www.one-name.org to find out if a one-name study has been established for any of the surnames on your tree. For example, the Izzard surname is listed, so if you suspect you have a connection to Eddie Izzard, you can visit the site, click on the link and learn more about the origins of the surname and its derivatives, as well as how often it appears in historical documents through time.

The website provides a useful profile for some of the registered One-Name Studies, including their aims and the data that has been gathered so far, along with contact details for the Guild member who posted the information. You can contact that member if you have a specific question you would like to ask about their findings. The Guild supports projects designed for experienced researchers, so if a surname you are interested in is not registered with the Guild, it is wise to research your own family tree first and then build up a portfolio of information about that particular name before registering the surname and starting a study. There are guidelines about how to begin a one-name study on the website.

SUMMARY

Check the following to see if some of your proposed research has already been done:

• The records of the Society of Genealogists

• Burke’s and Debrett’s Peerage and Baronetage, and The Records and Collections of the College of Arms

• Indexes of published pedigrees

• Genealogy websites

• The Guild of One-Name Studies, for a particular surname (especially if it is unusual)

Remember … Check the Evidence

It is imperative that you find out the sources of any research undertaken by other people before you even consider incorporating this data into your own family tree – it is vital that you can double-check their accuracy. Even if somebody else’s research has been published, their work is still liable to human error and it is not unusual to find a pedigree published in two books that has different dates of birth or death cited in each version. Therefore, check as many editions as you can for each published pedigree so that you can compare the information they contain, and then follow up the document references in the footnotes and examine the original sources.

Just as you did when you were collecting information from relatives, you should treat all second-hand evidence as merely a guideline to follow, rather than gospel truth. Use it as a short cut to the records that will allow you to verify the information, rather than taking the data at face value as proof of the past. Family trees published on the web are even less reliable simply because anybody can add to genealogy websites without needing to authenticate their entries. If you do contact another researcher who has seemingly investigated one of your family branches, do not be afraid to ask them how they came to their conclusions and what sources they have used. You can then follow up these sources yourself to see if you find them convincing as evidence.

‘Treat all second-hand evidence as merely a guideline to follow, rather than gospel truth.’

Despite these words of warning, family tree sharing facilities are fantastic genealogical tools, particularly the online versions that enable researchers to share ideas and learn from each other’s work. Once you have completed your research you should consider making it into a book, perhaps using one of the family tree software packages suggested in Chapter 2 – many of which include a publishing suite – so that you can deposit your work at the Society of Genealogists or your local record office for other researchers to benefit from.

Researching Your Genealogy Online

Genealogy as a pastime is at its most popular in the twenty-first century, partly thanks to the wealth of resources that have been made available online to millions of people at the click of a mouse. Whereas family history was once the domain of the upper classes who had access to (or were keen to prove) their pedigrees, and die-hard genealogists prepared to spend hours scouring reels of microfilm in search of each new name on their family tree, now anybody with a vague interest in their roots, regardless of status or origin, can start investigating. Because there is such an enormous interest in the subject, there will always be somebody online who can be of assistance if you are struggling with your research.

There are literally millions of genealogy websites out there – just try typing ‘family history’ into Google and see how many hits you receive! This can make it difficult to know where to begin, so here we’ll de-mystify the process and highlight the most useful sites you’ll need to visit. Basically, the core resources you will be working from can be broken down into the following categories:

• Commercial or institutional websites supplying access to datasets, images of records, or indexes to documents (‘dataset’ websites)

• Websites of genealogical organizations that provide advice, or links to other resources (‘portal’ websites)

• Websites where you can link with other users and join social networks (‘network’ websites)

Dataset Websites
Commercial Sites

There are many commercial websites that have worked in conjunction with archives to provide reliable historical material online. For example, The National Archives at Kew have teamed up with commercial companies such as Ancestry and Find My Past to enable online access to census returns, military records, ships passenger lists and more, whilst the National Archives of Scotland have established a partnership with the Scottish General Register Office and the Court of the Lord Lyon to create an official website – www.scotlands people.gov.uk – where Scottish parish registers, civil registration, probate and census records are available to those unable to travel to the archives.

‘Datasets are digital collections of particular records that can be searched using a name-based index or search engine.’

As a result, there are many commercial subscription-based websites that offer access to datasets, namely digital collections of particular records that can be searched using a name-based index or search engine, and you will often find more than one website offering access to the same records – civil registration indexes and census returns being prime examples (the relevant resources are listed in Chapters 5 and 6 respectively). The differences between the various websites are usually the type of search engine they offer and the cost of accessing the records. For instance, you may find two websites that will give you online access to census records, but one is better for finding ancestors by name and one is more useful for locating addresses on the census if you cannot find an ancestor by name. Equally, one website may offer a better deal for pay-per-view subscriptions and one a better deal on yearly subscriptions, so shop around and work out which ones better suit your needs.

Archives

In addition to the commercial organizations, major archives around the British Isles also give online access to digital copies of some of the documents in their holdings – though of course hard copies can still be ordered if you prefer. Therefore if you cannot get to these archives very easily you may be able to access some material from home. The types of records available from each archive’s website varies widely; for example, The National Archives’ website has a Documents Online area where you can pay to view copies of wills from medieval times to the mid-nineteenth century, as well as many military and naval documents, and you can order images of specific document references that are emailed to you using the online Digital Express facility. In contrast, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland does not yet enable any access to its holdings over the Internet. It is worth checking the websites of both the national and local archives that cover the regions your family were from to see if they have digital collections of any of their holdings, though this should not be considered a substitute to visiting the archives. Despite the growth in online availability, the bulk of the documents you’ll need will almost certainly have to be viewed on-site.

Newspaper Collections

It’s not just archives that are putting their holdings online. Online newspaper archives are increasingly useful for family historians, helping you to locate articles about your ancestors that may otherwise have never been found. It is always worth checking the local newspaper that covered the area your family lived in if you have a date of birth, marriage or death for a prominent ancestor that may have warranted a mention in the personal announcements or obituaries section. In the majority of cases you will still be required to visit the local library or county record office or go to the British Newspaper Library in north London to scroll through the original chronological records.

The most important records are the digitized collections of national newspapers, many of which can be searched by keyword, article type and date range. The Times is one of the most prominent of these; its collections are available online from 1785 to the present day. To access the entire collection of The Times an InfoTrac database connection is needed, to which most major archives and local library networks provide free access. Your local library may be able to give you a PIN number and instructions about how to use the database for free from home. The Scotsman also has an online database of its backdated editions from 1817 to 1950, accessed at http://archive.scotsman.com, and the historic archive of the London, Edinburgh and Belfast Gazettes can be searched and viewed for free at www.gazettes-online.co.uk.

Local newspapers tend to be more fruitful when searching for newspaper articles for the majority of our ancestors, but you may be surprised to locate an entry in a national newspaper in the form of criminal reports, court summaries, advertisements, changes of name and address notices, in addition to the many birth, marriage, death and funeral announcements and obituaries they contain. These ever-growing online newspaper archives are so useful to modern genealogists purely because they enable us to find articles about our ancestors by name rather than by searching through months’ or even years’ worth of original newspaper reports.

Portal Websites

There are numerous professional bodies in the field of genealogy that are at hand to aid you in your quest to find as much material as you can about your heritage, and most of the larger organizations attempt to do this as best they can via the web so that they reach the widest group of people. The Federation of Family History Societies (FFHS) has a Research Tips section on its website www.ffhs.org.uk, and the Society of Genealogists’ website www.sog.org.uk has genealogy leaflets that can be downloaded giving general advice about how best to go about tracing your roots. Many of the major archives also have subject-related research guides on their websites that guide you through locating and interpreting documents when at these institutions. One of the best places to find out more about the key resources you’ll be using is at www.familyrecords.gov.uk, which describes civil registration indexes, census returns, wills and probate documents and other material.

HOW TO …

… make the most of the Internet

If you are not an experienced computer and Internet user, it is probably worth investing in a good guide, like Peter Christian’s The Genealogist’s Internet or How To Trace Your Family History on the Internet published by Reader’s Digest. These books provide detailed explanations of how to research each aspect of family history using online resources and will guide you through the most popular sites. They also suggest a good range of websites for your online research.

GENUKI

GENUKI is a web-based charitable organization that offers information on all aspects of genealogy in the UK and Ireland. Its database of information and links is organized geographically and by theme on the www.genuki.org.uk website. While this site provides links to many other websites where you can seek help with any problems, the website itself aims to serve its users as a ‘virtual reference library’ and is not designed to answer specific research questions. It is supported by the FFHS and its member societies, who collaborate with GENUKI to provide them with much of the information contained on the site. It is therefore extremely useful for locating rare online indexes and transcriptions for records held in local archives that cannot be found on some of the large commercial dataset sites. As soon as you can pin a branch of your ancestors to one particular place, it is definitely worth visiting the GENUKI website because its sophisticated geographic index will show you all the key online tools and organizations that specialize in that area. Its topographical index is just as useful if there is a certain genealogical subject you are struggling with.

Cyndi’s List

Cyndi’s List is a web-based directory to help you find websites relevant to all areas of family history. Established by Cyndi Howells in 1996, Cyndi’s List is an excellent finding aid for genealogists, giving you links to thousands of useful websites. Go to www.cyndislist.com and search the Categories to find a website for whichever area of your research you need help with.

Network Websites

The benefits of data-sharing websites, where you can upload your family tree and search other researchers’ entries to find common ancestors, have been explored in Chapter 2, but there are other types of websites which help you to share and learn from other people’s research and expertise by posting messages about a specific ancestor, branch or topic of interest and awaiting responses from other users. Forums and chat rooms are particularly good for this purpose, and you will find that many sites with access to datasets also provide a forum for their members to communicate by.

Forums

Forums are great for accessing as many people with a like-minded interest as possible. If there is a family myth that you have been unable to unravel, it is possible that posting a message in a subject-related forum will attract replies from people who may be able to help, either because they have faced a similar scenario in their research, or perhaps because they recognize the names as some of their own ancestors. This way, if a family story has been passed down more than one branch distant cousins may be able to embellish with more detail about what they have heard and you can compare the two versions of events. Place your query in a forum category that best fits the subject of your enquiry, and be as specific as possible, mentioning the names you are interested in finding out more about and any relevant places and dates so that other users will be able to tell straight away if they can help you.

The British Genealogy website has links to forums covering all topics and counties at www.british-genealogy.com/forums, but also you should remember to look out for a forum section on the other websites mentioned in this book. The more forums you post your query in, the more likely you are to get a response.

Communities and Mailing Lists

The Internet is home to a range of online communities that are worth joining in order to communicate with other people who are equally as enthusiastic about their research as you. Being part of a community that has an interest in a genealogical subject you are really passionate about gives you access to a goldmine of knowledge. Whenever you are stuck you can turn to your online community and ask them for their help or opinions, whilst keeping abreast of all the latest news about your area of interest. If there is a special convention coming up, or a really important dataset is due to be released online, you should be among the first to know about it by keeping in touch with your fellow enthusiasts.

‘Being part of an online community gives you access to a goldmine of knowledge.’

These communities come in various guises. Joining a mailing list is one way to be part of an online community. Mailing lists allow subscribed members to debate a chosen topic and exchange information; each time somebody writes a comment an email is sent out to alert the other members of the list so that they can read it and reply. One of the most popular genealogy mailing lists is at www.rootschat.com, but a large selection of lists covering an extensive range of genealogical subjects can be found listed at Rootsweb – www.rootsweb.ancestry.com – whilst GENUKI also has a wealth of mailing lists found by searching at www.genuki.org.uk/searches.

SUMMARY

Online sources of information include:

• Dataset websites, such as those of national and local archives, newspapers and commercial organizations, providing digital collections of records

• Portal websites, for advice, information and links to other websites and collections

• Forums, communities and mailing lists, for subscribers to share information and research

If you would rather avoid the constant emails generated by mailing lists, but still like the idea of joining an online community, take a look at the Nations Memory Bank (NMB) website where you can become a member of one of the Family, Military, House, Fashion, and Local, National Trust or Food communities at www.nationsmemorybank. co.uk. NMB is a digital archive of all of our memories, not just family history, where photos can be uploaded and memories of different events relating to the images are placed on a memory map and discussed by other users in the forums. For example, you can post a picture of your family and ask other users of the site to help you name the people in it, or provide stories about what they were like. This is a great website for learning from other people’s experiences, and you can search for key words to find memories about a topic or place of interest relevant to your research. NMB is also a brilliant space for storing your own research. If you have recorded an interview with an elderly relative, why not transcribe that interview and store it as a memory on the site so that other users can read and learn from their recollections? (However, remember to seek the permission of the interviewee before putting their life story in the public domain.)

Internet Etiquette and Problems Associated with Online Genealogy

Experienced genealogists have voiced their concerns over the past few years about the increasing reliance on Internet resources as opposed to traditional methods of research. Whilst this largely stemmed at first from a reluctance to adapt to new technology, they have raised some very valid points.

Millions of original documents, catalogues and indexes have been digitized so that they can be searched online quickly and from the comfort of your own home, but this has led to a misapprehension that it is now possible to research an entire family tree on the Internet. This is certainly not the case, and although most of the key ‘first step’ resources are now online, only a very small percentage of the entire range of original documents useful to genealogists is available from the Internet. You will be required to make many trips to various archives, but this is all part of the fun.

Before you can even begin taking advantage of the many records that are online, you will probably need to research your family tree offline for at least a few generations before the Internet records are of any real use. The majority of records online pertain to the nineteenth century, mainly because many more recent sources (such as the vast majority of twentieth-century censuses) are ‘closed’ – that is, they are not available to be made public – because they contain sensitive personal information about individuals who could be still alive. More datasets for the twentieth century are now becoming available, however, such as phonebooks and directories, though these alone will not be enough to trace back a branch – only place them in one location at a given time. Online records for earlier eras are also scant, mainly because there are no centralized indexes for resources like parish registers and wills proved in county courts, making the task of putting them all online a very large-scale and time-consuming one.

‘The majority of records online pertain to the nineteenth century.’

Common Problems Working Online

Aside from the documents you may not be able to locate on the Internet, the ones that are available online come with their own set of problems. For a start, do not expect to locate online sources for your ancestors by simply typing their name into a major search engine like Google, Ask Jeeves, or Yahoo! While this will sometimes yield results if you are very lucky or if an ancestor was particularly famous, most will need to be found using a site-specific search engine, which requires that you first locate the relevant website. This is best done by starting with a source such as GENUKI or Cyndi’s List, described earlier.

Specialist search engines allow you to search the website’s online indexes either by keyword, surname, date or place. They will often have been created by people who have manually transcribed words from the original documents into computer software. While this is part of the beauty of Internet research, allowing you to find what you are looking for instantly without the need to consult card indexes or scroll through every page of a document to find a particular name, databases create problems of their own. There are many errors in the transcriptions that can make locating the entry you want difficult. These errors are usually because the person doing the transcribing was not able to read the original old handwriting very well. For example, if you were looking for Adam Benny on the census, his name may have been wrongly transcribed into the computer’s index as something similar, such as ‘Alan Remy’, in which case it would be difficult to locate this entry using a name search. There are tips on how to overcome some of these common errors throughout the book under the relevant subject headings, but if you find it very difficult locating records that should be online, then you will have to consult the original indexes or records at the archives.

Reliability: Checking Sources Online

As has been mentioned many times before, if you do find other researchers willing to share their findings with you online, whether through a family tree sharing site or a forum, make sure to always ask them how and where they found their sources so that you can double-check them yourself and ascertain their accuracy. There are thousands of people working in the online community who will hopefully be able to help you when you are stuck, but there is always the possibility that they have made errors too. This advice goes for websites set up by enthusiasts as well – plenty of people have now mastered the art of compiling their family history onto a personalized website, but there are no official checks to ensure all information published online is accurate, so it is important to carry out your own checks on their data. You can usually establish whether or not a website belongs to an accredited organization or a private individual from the URL address (i.e. the www. website address). If the address ends in ‘gov.uk’ this means it has been set up by a government organization, and those ending in ‘ac.uk’ belong to academic institutes, therefore their content should be reliable. Look out for the website administrator’s contact details so that you can get in touch with them should you need to qualify the validity of their data.

‘If you publish your family tree on a website or online, be aware of the various copyright laws that protect information supplied to you by other researchers or publications.’

Citations and Copyright

When incorporating online sources into your research it is vital that you cite those sources with the same attention to detail as you would for original documents from the archives. Include the full web address and details about the dataset or the owner of the site’s material. If you are considering publishing your family tree on a website or online using a family tree sharing facility, you must be cautious of the various copyright laws that protect information supplied to you by other researchers or publications. Any information you have found from databases online or on CD-ROM, or that has been supplied to you by other researchers’ websites, forum or mailing list postings, is protected by copyright, and therefore you should not replicate this data without first obtaining the owner’s permission.

SUMMARY

Problems associated with online genealogy:

• Not all documents are available online; you’ll still have to visit archives

• Transcription errors in online indexes will make your search more difficult at times

• The Internet has no quality controls on entries; double-check all your sources

• Copyright law will still apply to all online sources you quote

The laws on Crown Copyright have recently been modified so that you can transcribe extracts from unpublished original documents found in archives as long as the full reference is quoted. The laws pertaining to copyright are complex and official advice can be found at www.ipo.gov.uk. You should also be very wary of posting information in your family tree about anybody who is still alive without first asking their permission. The laws on data protection are unlikely to be a problem to you, but you have a duty to protect the privacy of those who have been kind enough to help you with your research, and those relatives who may be unaware of your investigations into their past. Most family tree sharing sites automatically hide details about living relatives from other users until you have given your permission for specific users to view your tree, and Cyndi’s List has links on its GEDCOM page under ‘Privacy in GEDCOM files’ to programs that will remove living relatives from a GEDCOM file before uploading it to an online database.

Getting Help Offline
Problem Solving

Section Four provides a unique resource for all family historians – a structured route through some of the more popular but often technically difficult topics that you are likely to encounter during your investigations into your past. However, if the suggestions included in the Section Four guides can’t answer your questions, here are a few more tips and tricks to help get you back on track again – bearing in mind, of course, that there may not actually be a solution!

Each type of document will present its own unique set of obstacles that may hinder you from finding the person you are looking for. A birth in England or Wales in 1846 may not be found in the civil registration indexes, for example, because although civil registration began in 1837, the rules governing its enforcement were not tightened up until 1875, and many people simply didn’t bother. These specific problems will be addressed when each subject is explored in detail in Sections Two and Three, but there are more general issues that affect most types of records.

Changes in the way names and places have been spelt over time are a common hindrance to family historians. When registering the name of a birth or baptism, or even when filling out a census return, the priest, registrar or enumerator would write a name how they heard it said, and very often the informant was illiterate and so would not be able to correct them if it was spelt wrong. Therefore, if you cannot find an ancestor in alphabetical indexes under the name you were expecting, think of all the variations of spelling that name could sound like and conduct a search under those options too. Common variations occur when there is a silent letter, such as ‘e’ at the end of a name.

‘If you cannot find an ancestor in alphabetical indexes under the name you were expecting, think of all the variations of spelling that name could sound like and conduct a search under those options too.’

Similar rules apply to the spelling of place names that have been known to change frequently over time, but you should also be wary of places around the country (and even the world) being called the same name. There are indexes, like F. Smith’s A Genealogical Gazetteer of England, that can help you to find in which counties a place name is found, and thus help you continue your research in the correct area.

There are plenty of useful reference books to help you with a particular line of historical research. Your local library will stock a range of publications on the subject, particularly specialist volumes that include indexes. There are also many genealogical journals and magazines released weekly and monthly, like Ancestors Magazine, The Genealogists Magazine, Family History Monthly and Family Tree Magazine and, of course, the Who Do You Think You Are? magazine. They are all packed with fascinating articles and top tips, discussing the latest finding aids, computer software and issues that affect the modern genealogist. A lot of these magazines also have a genealogy agony aunt who will answer readers’ research questions.

Family History Societies

If, at any point during your research, you feel daunted by the next step, or have hit a brick wall on a certain line of enquiry, there are a multitude of individuals and societies out there that can be of assistance. Whatever your problem, it is likely that others have ground to a halt for similar reasons before you but have eventually found a route forward. Very few research problems are unique in genealogy, and as you find your way around one obstacle you will be able to use that experience as a lesson for the next time you get stuck. Even if you are confident researching your family tree alone, it is still advisable to join one of the many family and local history societies that we are lucky enough to have access to in the UK. You will always learn something from the experience other members have to offer, and be able to utilize the indexes, transcriptions and local projects that they have worked upon and which may not be available anywhere else.

There is a small charge to join a society, but the talks they offer to members, the networking they provide between researchers, the regular journals that are issued and their access to indexes unique to their subject matter make it all worth while. You should join a history society local to the area your ancestors were from so that you can benefit from the expertise of others who have researched that area and are compiling indexes for records relevant to that location. The Federation of Family History Societies (FFHS) is the umbrella organization that unites and represents all of the smaller societies around England, Wales and Ireland. You cannot join the FFHS itself, but you can consult their website at www.ffhs.org.uk to find a family history society local to you. The Scottish Association of Family History Societies (SAFHS) provides a similar network for family history societies in Scotland, and its membership list can be searched from www.safhs.org.uk. The GENUKI website also has a page for locating societies geographically, with links to each society’s website.

The range of history societies open to genealogists from around the world is staggering – take any topic you can think of and you are likely to find that a society has already been established to unite and aid researchers in that field of study. In addition to the hundreds of regional societies, there is a range of organizations that interest themselves in particular industries, professions and occupations. The Railway Ancestors Family History Society may be of benefit if you find an ancestor who worked in that profession; the Society for Army Historical Research could be worth joining if you have a long line of military ancestors in your tree. Societies dedicated to researching certain ethnic or religious groups also exist, such as the Romany and Traveller Family History Society, the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain, and the Catholic Family History Society.

There is likely to be more than one society that can assist you with your investigation, and the more you join, the wider your network will be when you do need advice.

Lectures, Courses and Workshops

If you find you have a burgeoning passion for family history and want to immerse yourself from the very beginning in all the research skills you’ll need, it might be worth investing in an Adult Education programme or Workers’ Educational Association course. These range from full-time courses to evening classes and are advertised by local libraries, colleges and some universities. The Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies (IHGS) promotes its own genealogy courses on its website at www.ihgs.org.uk. Obtaining a diploma or certificate in family history will not only help you to fully understand the more complex aspects of genealogy, but will be a good investment for the future if you decide to go on to teach the subject to others. Indeed, many universities now offer distance learning courses in the subject, as well as qualifications at degree level.

‘Archives run induction days, lectures or tutorials at both local and national level, often with a particular theme as the focus.’

Archives also run induction days, lectures or tutorials at both local and national level, often with a particular theme as the focus. Some archives publish details on their websites of the tutorials that are planned for the forthcoming year, as do other organizations.

The Society of Genealogists holds lectures on the documents that can be found for various types of occupation and circumstances, from researching ancestors in the brewery industry to finding out if your great-great-grandfather was sent to debtor’s prison. Lectures held at the SoG usually explain how to locate original documents from a few different archives if the relevant sources are not all held in one place. Booking your place at a lecture not only gives you the opportunity to ask the speaker specific questions they may not have covered in their talk, but you also get to meet other researchers who are interested in the same topic, so you can discuss ideas and problems with others after the talk.

Some professional genealogists and historians organize day-long workshops at archives using case studies to illustrate how to go about ordering and interpreting original documents at the archive. You should keep an eye out for advertisements for these workshops in family history magazines and local newspapers, and your family history society should be able to update you with the main events in the calendar. Although they usually cost quite a bit more than an hour’s seminar, these workshops are worth the money if you are having serious difficulties, because they offer a far more comprehensive lesson on researching the subject.

Many organizations, such as the Federation of Family History Societies, hold annual conferences which include keynote speeches, workshops and seminars where you can also learn a great deal about the subjects you are researching. There are also regular annual family and local history day events run by regional family history societies and groups, as well as the annual National History show in which family history features prominently, including the Society of Genealogists’ family history fair, and of course the Who Do You Think You Are? Live stage.

Professional Researchers

The last port of call if you really cannot overcome a research problem should be to turn to the professionals. It might also be worth paying somebody to research specific documents in an archive that is far away from where you live if it works out to be more costly to travel there yourself. There are many professional genealogists with years of experience working in archives who provide their services at a charge. Because very few archives offer their own research service, most will have a list of private researchers who have a thorough knowledge of their records. The National Archives has a list of independent researchers on its website where you can browse each person’s area of expertise and find contact details.

When approaching a professional researcher for a quote, you should always try to be as clear as possible about what you know already, what is fact and what is hearsay, and what you are hoping they will find out for you. It is better that you give too much information rather than too little to ensure they do not cover work you have already done yourself. However, you do not need to give them your entire family tree if you are only asking them to help you with one branch, especially as some researchers will charge you for the time it costs them to read through all your notes.

SUMMARY

Sources of offline help:

• Check out reference books at your local library

• Agony aunts in genealogical magazines and journals can help with research queries

• Family and topic-specific history societies provide local indexes, networking opportunities and expertise

• Courses, tutorials and workshops can give in-depth help and tips on particular subjects and archive collections

• Professional researchers

A lot of professional researchers charge by the hour, though some will have a daily fee. If you do want to go down this route, shop around to get some quotes before going with the first researcher you find, and make sure a set number of hours or a price is agreed before you commission them to go ahead with the work. While most researchers will advise an estimated quote for a job, it can be very difficult to judge exactly how long it will take to get to the bottom of a mystery or to conclude a job if you haven’t simply requested a set list of document searches, so your researcher may suggest they spend an initial few hours looking into the case so that they have more of an idea what documents survive. This way you pay a smaller amount, and will be updated about further avenues that could be explored.

SECTION TWO
Basic Sources

This section examines in detail the most important sources used to construct a family tree: civil registration or birth, marriage and death certificates, census returns, wills and probate material, and parish registers. These are used in combination. As a rough guide, civil registration certificates will be your first port of call. From the beginning of the twentieth century you can also use census returns. These will be available as far back as the early nineteenth century, before which time parish registers should be consulted. Prior to that you will only be able to rely on parish registers and probate documents.

CHAPTER 5
Civil Registration

Some of the most important sources for any family historian are the records generated by civil registration – birth, marriage and death certificates. They are, essentially, the ‘building blocks’ for any family tree and can be used to verify initial information gathered from your relatives, or extend your family tree further back in time. This chapter explains what these sources are, where you can find them, how you can order them and various ways you can extract relevant information to help with your research.

The journey from cradle to grave has been officially recorded by the state since the nineteenth century, when the civil registration of births, marriages and deaths was first introduced. The government passed legislation making it mandatory to register the birth of every child, the marriage of each couple and the death of every person from 1 July 1837 in England and Wales, with the subsequent issue of paperwork – birth, marriage and death certificates. Similar legislation enforcing the same was enacted in Scotland from 1 January 1855 and in Ireland from 1864 onwards (although Protestant marriages in Ireland had been registered since 1845). These monumental changes to everyday life came about through the government’s desire to monitor population trends more effectively, following a Parliamentary Report in 1836. Previously, the established Church of England had collected some of this information through its parish registers – a subject tackled in Chapter 7. However, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, penalties against non-conformist religious bodies were relaxed, which led to a growth in these movements, and the number of people whose journey through life was not recorded by the Church of England increased dramatically. Therefore by the beginning of the nineteenth century the information held by the established Church could no longer be deemed accurate, and so a parliamentary committee was set up to investigate the problem.

The introduction of a centralized system whereby birth, marriage and death certificates were generated is crucially important for anyone wishing to research their family tree, as it is possible to obtain copies of every certificate issued going back to the earliest records in 1837. Each type of certificate will give different clues, depending on which one is viewed, and this chapter explains how the system worked; what each certificate contains, and how you can obtain copies for your ancestors; common problems in tracking down certificates; what material is available online; and a summary of civil registration in Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

‘Birth, marriage and death certificates are crucially important for anyone wishing to research their ancestors.’

Civil Registration in England and Wales

In 1837, England and Wales were divided up into 27 registration districts, based upon the contemporary Poor Law Unions. Each district was administered by a Superintendent Registrar and was further subdivided into local districts staffed by local registrars. The original registration districts were reorganized in 1852 and their number increased to 33, with a further revision taking place in 1946. A Registrar General was appointed to be responsible for the entire system and was originally based in London.

The local registrar would record each birth or death and originally it was the responsibility of the official to collect this information. He would be expected to travel through his local district and record each birth within six weeks and each death within five days. As there was no onus placed on the family to report this information there may be some gaps in the early registers. The situation changed in 1874 with the passing of the Births and Deaths Registration Act. The burden of responsibility for reporting the information now lay with the family; fines were payable for late or non-registration from 1875 onwards.

Each event was recorded on a special form, with one copy retained by the registrar and one copy issued to the informant. The information compiled locally would then be sent to the superintendent registrar, who would in turn send a copy of all registrations in his district to the Registrar General in London on a quarterly basis.

The situation was slightly different for marriages. The clergy for churches that were officially authorized to record marriages were expected to send the quarterly returns straight to the Registrar General in London. Non-conformist churches had to have their buildings licensed to perform such ceremonies, with the local registrar being legally obliged to be present to record the details. However, from 1899 the situation changed thanks to the Marriage Act of 1898, and non-conformist clergy from these churches could also record and submit the information themselves.

Making the Most of Civil Registration Certificates

Every birth, marriage and death is recorded at a local Registry Office and a certificate is produced to confirm the details of each event, although the information on each type of certificate varies according to the country it was registered in. Each country has a centralized registration index arranged chronologically so you can research all of your ancestors from one place regardless of their geographic spread. It is essential to have evidence of at least each person’s birth and marriage on your tree. Even if you are starting with yourself, make sure you can locate your birth certificate and compare it with your parents’ marriage certificate to ensure all the names, occupations and dates match up.

This process should be repeated for every person on your tree. For example, if you have a birth certificate for Mary King, born in 1912 in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, which told you that her father was Herbert King, a railway fireman, and her mother was called Thirza King, formerly Payling, then you would expect her parents’ marriage certificate to be dated prior to 1912 and contain similar details. This marriage certificate would then tell you Thirza’s father’s name and that of Herbert’s and their occupations, giving you new information to work with. You would also expect Mary King’s own marriage certificate to confirm her year of birth, father’s name and occupation.

Death certificates are of less genealogical use than birth and marriage certificates because they tend to only really give information about the deceased individual. That is not to say it isn’t worthwhile ordering death certificates. They can tell us the deceased person’s age, which enables you to establish when they were born if you have nothing else to work from. Death certificates can be more helpful for ancestors who died shortly after the introduction of civil registration, because it will be more difficult to find information about them from other records. Apart from details about the cause of death, notes given on death certificates can lead you to other sources by giving details about a coroner’s inquest that might have taken place. If you know when and where an ancestor died (which will be recorded on the certificate) it also makes the hunt for a will and burial record easier.

Look out for the names of witnesses and informants on civil registration certificates. These people are often close family members and if you know their names, even if you are not yet sure exactly how they are related, you may be able to identify your ancestors in other documents, such as household census returns.

Research hints

There are general rules you can follow when searching for the births, baptisms, marriages, deaths and burials of ancestors you have never known even if you only have a rough idea of when they were alive:

1. If you start from the last known birth on your tree for which you have a birth certificate, say your grandmother’s birth certificate dated 1917 for example, this should give you her parents’ names. You can then search for a marriage under their names back from 1917. You may have to work back as much as twenty years to 1897 if your grandmother was the youngest of a large generation of children, but once you have found your great-grandparents’ marriage in the indexes you can order the certificate to find out their ages, which will enable you to then search for their birth certificates over a range of a few years.

2. Some marriage certificates do not give exact ages and will state ‘full age’ instead, meaning a person was over 21 years old, or will say ‘minor’ if they were less than 21 years old. Where this is the case you can search for that person’s birth date starting from around 16 years prior to the date on their marriage certificate and working back perhaps as many as 20 more years, if they married late in life. Starting a birth search 16 years prior to a marriage date also works well when searching parish registers, which rarely give ages.

3. If you are keen to find out when an ancestor died, the only way to do this from death and burial indexes is to establish the last known time they were alive and work forward from then. Perhaps your grandmother was a witness on her daughter’s marriage certificate in 1965, in which case you can conduct a search for your grandmother’s death from 1965 onwards. If you are looking for the death of a person who was born over 100 years ago, you would usually only need to search up until they would have been 100 years old. It is important to conduct a search for the longest period of time over which an event was likely to have occurred, particularly if you are looking for somebody with a common name.

4. When searching the birth, marriage and death indexes you will often come across more than one possible match, and the only way to find out which one is correct is to order the certificates for the most likely options and compare them against other information you have gathered for that person. If you are confident that you have conducted a thorough search of the indexes, then you will know that you have not missed anything.

As mentioned above, it was the duty of the local superintendent registrar to forward the information to the Registrar General in London. Therefore there are two sets of records: the original records held at the local registrar’s office and the copies held by the Registrar General. Once the records arrived at the Registrar General’s office in London, clerks would reorganize them. They made alphabetical indexes for the certificates, broken down on a quarterly basis. Currently, the general public has no legal right to view the original certificates held locally but only the copies held by the Registrar General, though you can order duplicate copies of the original records from local register offices. The records of the Registrar General for England and Wales are now in the General Register Office (GRO), which is a department of the Office of National Statistics, and duplicates can also be ordered online at www.gro.gov.uk. Separate arrangements exist for Scotland and Ireland, and are discussed later in this chapter.

What Do the Certificates Contain?
Birth Certificates

Birth certificates are the official record of the individual’s place and date of birth. As mentioned, each birth had to be recorded within six weeks of the event, although this would not always happen, particularly if the family were travelling at the time of the birth, and waited to register it until they returned home.

The GRO birth indexes include all of England and Wales. Each entry is entered in alphabetical order, annually and then in the relevant quarter – March, June, September, December. All births registered between 1 January and 31 March are included in the March quarter; between 1 April and 30 June in the June quarter; between 1 July and 30 September in the September quarter; and between 1 October and 31 December in the December quarter. After 1984 the registers are arranged annually and not on a quarterly basis. An appropriate index reference number is also provided, which is the key piece of information needed to order the certificate. From the September quarter of 1911 the maiden name of the mother was also included in the index entry.

The actual certificates provide the following information:

• Where and when born: The precise date and location of the birth; if the exact time is given it signifies that it was a multiple birth (possibly twins or triplets). In this case you may wish to search for the other sibling(s), who should have the same surname and registration reference.

• Name (if any): This should be the full name given, including any middle names (the index will only give the initials of any middle names given). Some parents would change the name (this was allowed up to one year following registration). In such a scenario both the original and the altered name should appear. Sometimes a birth would be registered even though no first name had been chosen. This explains the ‘if any’ in brackets on the certificate. In the indexes there are also entries at the end of surnames for ‘male’ or ‘female’, used when the first name had yet to be decided.

• Name and surname of the father: The full name of the father.

• Name and maiden surname of the mother: The full name of the mother, including her ‘former’ (maiden) name; this last piece of information is particularly useful when trying to trace the maternal line further back. You may also find evidence of a prior divorce in this section too.

• Rank and profession of father: This provides the occupation of the father. This is a good genealogical clue, determining the social status of your ancestor. You may also be able to use this piece of information to search for employment records for your ancestor. Bear in mind, however, it would not be that uncommon for people to ‘inflate’ the status of their occupation.

• Signature, description and residence of informant: This is the individual who registered the birth. In most cases it would be the father, but not always. Sometimes there is a mark instead of a signature, indicating the informant was illiterate.

• When registered: The date the birth was officially registered; don’t forget, this could be up to six weeks after the actual birth, so if you think your ancestor was born in late March, June, September or December and can’t find an entry in the relevant quarter, it might be worth checking the indexes for the following quarter too.

• Signature of registrar: The name and signature of the registrar.

CASE EXAMPLE

Birth certificates

Bill Oddie’s story was one of the most poignant told on Who Do You Think You Are? as he wished to investigate the background to his mother’s ill health and rumours that he had a sister. The story of his missing sister was quickly established by tracking down his parents’ marriage certificate of 1938, establishing Bill’s mother’s maiden name (Clegg) and looking in the national GRO indexes for the birth of any children with the surname Oddie, mother’s maiden name Clegg, in the Rochdale area, where the family lived at the time.

A fairly quick search revealed that a Margaret J. Oddie, mother’s maiden name Clegg, was born in the March quarter of 1940. On ordering the certificate (above, left), her parents were listed as Harry Oddie and Lilian Oddie, née Clegg – the same as Bill’s. This therefore was his missing sister, and a further search of the death indexes showed that she had died as an infant the same quarter, explaining why Bill never knew about her existence.

Marriage Certificates

A marriage certificate is the official record of when and where a marriage took place, in addition to the record that would have been compiled in the relevant religious institution (a parish register, for example; these have been kept since the sixteenth century, and continue to be compiled today – see Chapter 7 for more details). They are a particularly rich source for the genealogical researcher as they give lots of clues for various ancestors. As mentioned above, from 1837 onwards, marriages of individuals of the Church of England, along with Jews and Quakers (where buildings were licensed to hold marriages), were recorded by the priest or responsible clerk and sent to the General Registrar’s Office in London. For other non-conformists, the local registrar recorded the marriage. This requirement was relaxed in 1898 and an ‘authorized person’ from other religious denominations could also record this information and send it forward to the appropriate bodies.

It is important to remember the age of consent before conducting a marriage search. In 1929 it was raised to 16 years for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Prior to this it had been 14 for boys and 12 for girls. In the Republic of Ireland the age of consent was only raised to 16 in 1975, having been kept at the ages of 14 for boys and 12 for girls until then. It’s worth bearing these ages in mind when searching for marriage certificates, making sure you search back far enough. The age of consent, however, differs from the legal age at which people could marry without parental consent, and in England and Wales this was 21 until 1969, after which it was reduced to 18 – though in Scotland it is as low as 16.

The GRO indexes include an entry for both the bride and the groom. If you know the names of both parties who were married it is advisable to search for the least common surname. The registers are arranged annually and then on a quarterly basis. They are then indexed alphabetically by the surname and then forename of the bride and groom. From the March quarter of 1912 the surname of the spouse is also given. Lastly there will be a numerical reference for the marriage.

The actual certificate will provide the following information:

• Above the columns there will be a section stating exactly where the marriage took place (which church or other place) and in which parish and county. This is very useful as it can indicate whether your ancestors were non-conformists or not.

• When married: The exact date the marriage took place.

• Name and surname: The full names of both parties getting married.

• Age: The given age of the bride and groom; it is important to note that these may not be entirely accurate. It was not uncommon for people to state that they were simply of a ‘full’ age or even a ‘minor’ age. Prior to 1969, full age would be someone aged over 21 years and a minor anyone younger than 21. Thus it could be problematic working out the exact ages when trying to find the birth records of these people. Also, it was not uncommon for people to lie about their age, depending on the circumstance. People under 21 may claim to be several years older to avoid the need for parental consent. Alternatively, older women marrying men significantly younger than them may give a younger age to minimize any potential scandal.

• Condition: This column states whether the marrying party was a bachelor, spinster or widow/widower. You may be surprised to find out that your relatively young ancestor was already widowed and marrying for a second time. However, mortality rates would have been significantly higher in the early period of civil registration and sometimes people lost their spouses quite soon after marriage, particularly in childbirth. Remarriage was therefore a viable practice, especially with young widowed men with small children who needed a maternal figure to look after them.

• Rank or profession: The occupation of the two parties is stated here. In the same way as with the occupation section in birth certificates, be aware of exaggerations and, depending on the given occupation, whether you will be able to locate their employment records. Female occupations were not regularly detailed until the twentieth century.

• Residence at the time of the marriage: The address of the bride and groom at the time of their wedding; the usual custom was to be married in the parish of the bride and sometimes the groom would have a temporary address in that same parish, as he would have had to have been living in the parish for a month to be married there.

• Father’s name and surname: A vital clue for the genealogical researcher, helping one get one generation further back at the same time, although the mother’s name would not be given. If the father was deceased it would often (but not always) be recorded as ‘deceased’ in brackets after the father’s name.

• Rank or profession of father: The occupation of the father of both bride and groom is provided. Again, be aware of the same inaccuracies in the given occupations.

• The type of marriage: Whether the marriage was performed by a marriage licence or banns, announced in the parish church for the three weeks preceding the wedding.

• Name and signature of two witnesses: At least two people are required to witness the marriage. These would often, but not always, be family members of the bride and groom.

CASE EXAMPLE

Marriage certificates

To trace Bill Oddie’s family further back in time, it was necessary to verify the personal details of each generation and order the necessary certificates. This meant starting at the beginning by obtaining the marriage certificate (left) of his parents, Harry Oddie and Lilian Clegg, in 1938. The GRO indexes were examined, and an entry quickly found in the December quarter. The certificate was ordered, and contained the following information.

Marriage at the Methodist Church, William Street, Rochdale

Groom: Harry Oddie, 28, bachelor; occupation municipal clerk; address 17 Russell Street, Rochdale; father Wilkinson Oddie (deceased), loom overlooker

Bride: Lilian Clegg, 24, spinster; occupation shop assistant, general store: address 82 Grove Street, Rochdale; father Joseph Peter Clegg (deceased), engineer

Witnesses: Edgar Oddie, Marion Oddie

With this information other searches could be started. Harry and Lilian’s ages at marriage meant that their birth certificates were relatively easy to locate – Harry was born in 1910 and Lilian in 1914 – whilst searches could be started for their fathers’ death certificates as well, prior to 1938.

Death Certificates

These certificates record the time and cause of death. They are perhaps less obviously useful for people trying to take generations further back, but can give a useful picture of the social standing and life conditions of your ancestor (usually indicated by cause of death).

The recording and indexing of death certificates is done in the same way as births, with a record being kept locally by the superintendent registrar and one nationally at the GRO. A death would be recorded locally where it occurred, rather than on the actual residence of the deceased. Again, the GRO indexes are organized annually and then subdivided into quarters. Within these quarters the individuals are listed strictly alphabetically, surname first and then forename. From the March quarter of 1866 to the March quarter of 1969 an age of death for the deceased also appears. Hence there is no need to order the actual certificate if you only require this information (and if you are sure this is the correct ancestor, as with common names you may only be able to verify if it is the right person by obtaining the actual certificate). From June 1969 an age at death was replaced by the date of birth of the individual. As with birth and marriage certificates, the indexes were organized annually from 1984, and not further subdivided on a quarterly basis.

The actual certificate will give the following information:

• The exact registration district where the death was recorded.

• When and where died: The exact location of where the death occurred, which may not be where the deceased lived as he or she may have been visiting family or died in hospital.

• Name and surname: The full name of the deceased.

• Sex: Whether the deceased was male or female.

• Age: The age of the deceased; this is perhaps the most useful piece of information for those wishing to take their family tree further back in generations. Once you have an age it is possible to start searching for the individual’s birth certificate and parentage. Bear in mind, however, that this information would not always be accurate as no proof of age was required. Not everyone remembered their age with absolute certainty, especially those born prior to civil registration or in the early part of the nineteenth century.

• Occupation: A good genealogical clue in helping trace appropriate employment records if relevant. Women who were married or widowed would usually have the name and maybe occupation of their husband provided, which can be useful.

• Cause of death: The more modern records of death may give quite specialized medical terms that may need to be researched. The early certificates could be somewhat vaguer in the medical terms used. The cause and age of death are good indicators of the living conditions of the deceased, with poorer people generally having shorter life spans then the wealthier classes. Additionally, a sudden death or accident would often require a coroner’s inquest before the death certificate could be issued, and the date of the inquest should be stated on the certificate. These inquests may well have been reported in local newspapers and it is worth pursuing this line of enquiry. You may also be able to find the actual coroner’s report in your local record office. However, they are subject to data protection for 75 years and not every report would have survived, as there is no legal requirement to retain the information after 15 years have elapsed.

• Signature, description and residence of the informant: This can also be a useful piece of genealogical information as sometimes it would be family members who would register the deaths. However, after 1874 the law changed and it was compulsory to have a doctor’s certificate before a death certificate could be issued, and hence doctors would sometimes appear as the informants.

• When registered: The date the death was registered, the legal requirement being five days after the death of the person. However, if a coroner was involved, there may well be a considerable delay in registration.

• Signature of registrar: The signature of the local registrar.

CASE EXAMPLE

Death certificates

Whilst pursuing Bill Oddie’s family tree, his parents’ marriage certificate revealed that both their fathers had died by the time the couple married in 1938. This information was used to search for the death certificate (below, left) of Wilkinson Oddie, Bill’s grandfather. Starting with 1938, a search was made backwards in time, and an entry was found in 1927 for Wilkinson Oddie, aged 62, whose death was registered in the Oldham district. This important biographical information made it easy to look for his birth certificate, which was found in Rochdale in 1864. Given Bill’s father Harry was born in 1910, Wilkinson would have been 46 at the time of his son’s birth, which seemed quite old. Having found his birth and death certificate, a search was made for Wilkinson’s marriage certificate prior to 1910, which was found registered in Rochdale in 1907, to Emily Hawksworth. On the certificate, Wilkinson’s age was confirmed at 42 and his marital status was listed as widower. Clearly, further stories remained to be uncovered in Wilkinson’s background …

How to Locate and Order a Certificate

As mentioned above, information has been recorded at a local and a national level so there are two sources you’ll need to consider. The national indexes have been compiled and retained by the GRO, whilst there are also indexes to the certificates available locally. It is crucial to remember that the index entries in the local registers are not the same as the ones available at the GRO as each office would use their own indexing system.

Local Registration

The original certificates for each registration district are held at the superintendent registrar’s office. Each major city would have one of these offices and there would be numerous superintendent offices per county. However, due to some boundary changes throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries some of these offices may have been abolished and their records transferred to another office nearby. Each local register office is likely to have indexed the information by local district, year and then alphabetically (probably by first letter of surname only and not in strict alphabetical order). Hence in order to begin searching you will need to know the superintendent district and then the sub-district. The advantage of searching in the local registers is that it will be a quicker search to conduct, especially if the name you are looking for is relatively common. However, if you are not certain where the registration occurred, it is advisable to turn to the national GRO indexes.

National GRO Indexes

To order a duplicate certificate, you need to identify the relevant entry in the national indexes and note several pieces of information:

• The name of the individual (arranged in strict alphabetical order by surname)

• The name of the local district where the registration occurred

• The two-part numerical reference (the first being a code for the superintendent district and the second number a reference to the page where the certificate will be found)

Until October 2007, the national paper indexes were held at the Family Records Centre in Islington, London, before they were moved to Christchurch, Dorset; but they are no longer available for public inspection. Two projects are underway to create an online digital index service known as MAGPIE, linked to the Digitization of Vital Events (DoVE) project whereby the actual certificates would be made available as well. However, many commercial companies have created their own digital images and searchable databases of the GRO indexes – a topic that will be covered shortly – whilst the national GRO indexes have also been copied onto microfiche, and many local libraries and record offices hold copies. All duplicate certificates located on these national indexes have to be ordered online via the GRO website, www.gro.gov.uk, where you’ll also find details of how to complete the necessary forms and pay for the certificates and the expected length of time it will take to deliver.

‘Certificates give vital information about social status, place of residence and occupation.’

This is where you are likely to incur the most cost when building your family tree. At the time of going to press, each certificate will cost you £7 to purchase from the GRO, and takes a minimum of four days from receipt of order to dispatch of duplicate certificate. You can order a certificate on 24-hour turnaround, but these cost £23 so patience is probably a virtue! Despite these costs, you will need to order (where possible) a birth, marriage and death certificate for each direct ancestor, as the clues they contain will not only allow you to work back generation by generation but will also give you important information about their social status, place of residence and occupation.

Common Problems

Although it was a statutory obligation to register all births, marriages and deaths from 1 July 1837, you may well experience difficulties in finding an entry even though it should be included. There are numerous reasons behind this:

Late Registration

Often people would not register punctually. If you do not find an entry in the appropriate quarterly index, keep searching as it may well turn up later. A common mistake is to assume a marriage occurred at least nine months prior to a birth. This is by no means always the case, with people rushing to marry before a birth to avoid the stigma of having an illegitimate child.

Lack of Registration

Unfortunately, not every single event was registered. This was particularly the case in the early period of civil registration as some people treated the legal requirement to register with a degree of suspicion. Additionally, until the 1874 Act it was the responsibility of the local registrar to note down the event rather than that of each individual, and many people did not bother to report events to the registrar.

Some studies have estimated that as many as 15 per cent of births would not have been registered in the early years until the rules were changed from 1875, rising to as high as 33 per cent in some urban areas. Indeed, parents would attempt to hide the age of their children in order to send them to work as young as possible (child labour was being regulated by statute through various acts in the nineteenth century). Ignorance also played a part, as it was often not realized that registration was still required even if the child had been baptized, many people believing the church ceremony should be adequate. Hence, if the birth is not found, you should check the relevant parish records.

There are fewer gaps in the registration of marriages, although again it may be worthwhile consulting the local parish registers (see Chapter 7 for more information) to try and find a marriage this way, as some marriages in the early days of civil registration may have been recorded by the Church only. Additionally, some people lived as man and wife without actually ever marrying (legally it was the responsibility of those accusing the couple of having an ‘invalid’ marriage to prove it). This could be the case when people had separated but not formally divorced and remarriage was not an option.

The most complete set of registration certificates should be for deaths, but even some of these were missed in the early years of civil registration. Again it might be worthwhile searching for the burial in the appropriate parish, if known.

It is possible that the birth, marriage or death being searched for did not occur in England or Wales, and you may have to search in the Irish or Scottish records, discussed below. Alternatively, events may well have occurred overseas whilst a member of your family was on board a ship, serving in the armed forces or working in a colony in the British Empire. Information about looking for overseas civil registration is also discussed below.

‘An incorrect entry into the index is the most common reason for not finding an entry.’

Incorrect Index Entry

This is possibly the most common reason for not finding an entry, the mis-transcription by the clerk originally entering the information. Unfortunately, this was not so uncommon, especially in the earlier registers when everything was handwritten, making it difficult to read original certificates and therefore entering an index entry in the wrong place was an easy mistake to make. Certain letters are easily confused and this should be borne in mind when thinking of variant spellings:

• A capital handwritten B, P, D or even K can be easily confused

• It can be difficult to distinguish a ‘t’ from an ‘l’, an ‘m’ from an ‘n’ or an ‘e’ from an ‘i’ when handwritten

• As letters were often handwritten with large loops they could be easily misread and confused

• Some surnames have common variant spellings. For example ‘Matthews’ may be spelt ‘Mathews’, ‘Doherty’ as ‘Docherty’ or ‘Johnson’ as ‘Jonson’. Certain forenames may also have alternative spellings, such as ‘Sarah’ for ‘Sara’, ‘Conor’ for ‘Conner’ or ‘Coner’, or ‘Jane’ for ‘Jayne’.

Each step in the registration process could lead to a misspelling. Hence, by the time an entry has been placed in the national indexes the name could have altered a great deal. Thus if you have encountered a problem in the national indexes, try searching the local registers.

Another problem is that in the nineteenth century spellings were not necessarily uniform and some people spelt their names differently at various times. The relatively low level of literacy would also lead to inaccuracies as it would not be possible for people to ensure their names were spelt properly. In such circumstances the individual writing down the information would have to spell the name phonetically, which could lead to problems with uncommon surnames.

The last thing to remember is the use of nicknames, as information may be recorded either as the full correct name or as the more informal nickname. Hence, when looking for the birth of an ‘Anthony’, ‘James’ or ‘Nicholas’, remember to search for the shortened versions of these names – ‘Tony’, ‘Jim’ or ‘Nick’ – if you have no joy.

Online GRO Indexes

The growth of the Internet in the past 10 years has seen a huge growth of genealogical websites. Many commercial ventures have invested a large amount of time and money in digitizing many genealogical documents, including the GRO indexes and some local registers. It is now possible to search for your certificates online and, depending on which website you choose, many of these searches are also free of charge. Below is a list of some of the most useful online sources.

www.freebmd.org.uk

This is a free-to-view website run by volunteers who have been manually transcribing each single index entry in the GRO indexes. At the time of going to print the team has transcribed over 135 million records, with entries being relatively complete from 1837 to about 1915. It is an ongoing project and it is hoped that the whole period of civil registration will eventually be covered.

The main advantage of this site is that you can search for a particular name through a number of quarters all at once, rather than having to search through each quarter one by one. If you do find a relevant entry on the website it is advisable to double-check the entry with the original entry before ordering, in case of any transcription error.

www.ancestry.co.uk

This is the largest commercial genealogical website geared to the UK market currently on the Internet. Although many of its databases are only accessible upon payment, it is possible to search the GRO indexes online free of charge after registering your details on the website. Ancestry has scanned images of each page of the GRO indexes for every quarter, which means you need to search for an entry by going through each quarter at a time, as there is no single-name database or digital image of each individual entry.

www.findmypast.com

This is another commercial genealogical website. It has placed the GRO indexes on its website in a similar fashion to Ancestry, by digitally scanning each page of every quarter for the entire civil registration period. Again, due to the digitization process you still need to search through each quarter as not every entry has been individually scanned. It is not free of charge but runs a pay-per-view service.

www.familyrelatives.com

Family Relatives have also provided online access to digitized GRO indexes. There are fully transcribed searchable indexes for the periods 1866–1920 and 1984–2005, whilst it is possible to search the periods 1837–65 and 1921–83 by surname and browse the GRO index images. To use this service, you need to register as a user, log in and buy credits.

Along with placing the GRO indexes online, certain local archives and record offices are investing in placing their local registrar indexes online too. There are websites such as www.ukbmd.org.uk, which lists which local indexes have been transcribed or placed online.

Civil Registration of Britons Overseas

Millions of Britons have worked overseas in the armed forces, as civil servants in one of the colonial administrations that comprised the British Empire, or on board a vessel travelling between foreign parts. Although they were not incorporated in the main national or local civil registration indexes, attempts were made to register as many of these people as possible, and the records are analysed here.

Overseas registers have been kept by the GRO and duplicate certificates can be purchased via the links on the GRO website www.gro.gov.uk once you’ve found the correct registration reference. There are indexes available on microfiche at The National Archives at Kew and other archives, or online at www.findmypast.com. These are broken down by period and type, covering:

• General indexes from 1966

• Colonial and ex-colonial indexes, 1940–81

• Civilian indexes 1849–1965, consular registers of births, marriages and deaths

• Civilian indexes 1837–1965, marine registers of births and deaths

• Civilian indexes 1947–65, air registers of births and deaths

• Civilian indexes, various foreign registers

• Military indexes 1761–1924 regimental births

• Military indexes 1796–1880 chaplains’ returns of births, marriages and deaths

• Military indexes 1881–1955 army births, marriages and deaths

• Military indexes 1956–65 army, navy, RAF births and marriages

• War deaths 1899–1948

In addition, there are separate consular records for people who were baptized or married or whose death was recorded at a British embassy or consulate. These records are predominantly held at The National Archives in a variety of record series. For a full list of countries covered, and where the records are stored, you should consult The British Overseas: a guide to records of their births, baptisms, marriages, deaths and burials available in the United Kingdom (3rd edition, 1994) published by Guildhall Library. Further information is likely to be held in consular correspondence, which is also held at The National Archives in series FO 83 and FO 97, with an index available in document FO 802/239. Records of non-statutory registers, many of which relate to births overseas and on board ships, can be found in the collected archives of the Registrar General at The National Archives in series RG 32–36.

Civil Registration in Scotland

Scotland has its own civil registration process, and the records are known as Statutory Registers. Civil registration was begun slightly later than in England and Wales, in 1855, but the certificates are more detailed then their counterparts across the border. Indeed, the earliest ones in 1855 are particularly detailed, though the sheer amount of information requested proved very difficult to record and thereafter the list of questions was simplified somewhat.

Additionally, the civil registration records are held in the same place as the parish records, in the General Register Office of Scotland (GROS) in Edinburgh. It is therefore possible to conduct a large amount of your genealogical research in the same place, which can simplify things greatly. The GROS levies charges for anybody using their services. These charges vary depending on whether you wish to visit the office for one day, one week or annually. At time of going to print the daily rate is £17 and the weekly rate £65. It is also advisable to book an appointment before visiting as there are only a limited number of spaces and the office may be fully booked.

Another advantage that the Scottish records have is that the indexes are fully computerized, which means you can search for a specific entry by name across the entire period. The computer database contains summaries of microfiche registers that contain the entire entry, and this latter entry is the one required for ordering copies of the certificates at GROS.

Birth Certificates

Birth indexes include the mother’s maiden name from 1929 onwards. The certificates themselves are similar to the English and Welsh certificates in giving the full name, the child’s sex, when and where (including time) they were born, the father’s full name and occupation along with the mother’s name (and maiden name), and similar details are provided relating to the registration details. However, where Scottish birth certificates differ is that they provide the details (time and place) of the marriage of the parents, including any other married names. In 1855 the certificates also stated the birth details of the parents along with details of other siblings, but this was quickly deemed too much information and was not given from 1856 onwards. The years 1856 to 1860 do not give marriage details of the parents either.

Marriage Certificates

Indexes are arranged separately by bride and groom. However, from 1855 to 1863 and then from 1929 you can find entries for brides in both their maiden names and their married names. The certificates themselves also note where and when the marriage took place, the type of marriage ceremony, full names, ages, marital status and occupation of the bride and groom. The additional details peculiar to Scottish certificates are the occupation and maiden names of the mother of each party. In 1855 only the certificates also state where the bride and groom were born and any previous marriage (along with names of any other children from the previous marriage).

Death Certificates

The indexes for these certificates are arranged thus:

• Age at death is provided from 1866 onwards

• The maiden name of the deceased’s mother from 1974 onwards

• Deceased married women are indexed by their married and maiden name after 1858

The registers themselves detail the name, age, exact time and location of death, the person’s occupation and their marital status. Medical causes of death are also provided. Scottish certificates give the name of the deceased’s spouse from 1861 (and in 1855) and the names of the deceased’s parents (including the mother’s maiden name). The earliest certificates of 1855 state where the deceased was born and how long they lived there, along with the details of any children (their ages and if they were still alive). From 1855 to 1860 burial details of the deceased are also provided.

Other Hints

There is a central website – www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk – that allows you to search by name the statutory registers of births (1855–1906), marriages (1855–1931) and deaths (1855–1956), as well as the old parish registers (which are covered in Chapter 7). You can search and download images of these registers for this period without needing to travel to the GROS in Edinburgh, although the website does charge to access this information.

The Society of Genealogists holds copies of indexes for Scottish statutory registers for the years 1855 to 1920. You may also be able to find indexes at various local family history societies.

Civil Registration in Ireland

Although civil registration for Protestant marriages began from 1 April 1845, the comprehensive civil registration of births, marriages and deaths was introduced to Ireland later, on 1 January 1864, on a similar model to that of England and Wales. These events would be recorded locally at the district registrar’s office and then copies passed on to the General Register Office in Dublin. However, in 1922 the country was partitioned and divided into Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Subsequently, civil registration was also divided between those two territories and a separate office was opened in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Republic of Ireland General Register Office

The General Register Office of Ireland (GROI) is located in Dublin and houses the national indexes along with microfilm copies of the originals for the entire country from 1 January 1864 until 31 December 1921. It also has the copies of all the early Protestant marriages, which were recorded from 1 April 1845. From 1 January 1922 the office records all events that occurred in the Republic of Ireland. You will be charged to search through the indexes and a further charge will be incurred for ordering any certified copies of the registers.

‘Comprehensive civil registration was only introduced in Ireland in 1864.’

Birth Indexes

The indexes are arranged alphabetically by the child’s surname and then forename. After 1902 the mother’s maiden name is included in the indexes. The actual date of birth of the child can be found in the indexes from 1903 to 1927.

Marriage Indexes

The indexes are arranged by name of both the bride and groom. The registers themselves contain the same information as to be found on the English and Welsh certificates.

Death Indexes

The age of the deceased is included in the indexes. There is no date of birth of the deceased in the modern registers. All other details tally with the information found on English and Welsh certificates.

General Register Office of Northern Ireland

Civil registration records are housed in the General Register Office of Northern Ireland (GRONI), Belfast, for all events in the six counties of Northern Ireland since 1922. The original registers for births and deaths from 1864 can also be found here.

Birth Indexes

Births are indexed in this office. From 1903 to 1921 the date of birth of the child is also provided. They are arranged in a similar manner to those for England and Wales.

Marriage Indexes

Marriages are only to be found from 1922 onwards. Prior to that, if you are searching for a marriage in the six counties you may be able to find it in the applicable district registrar’s office.

Death Indexes

You can find records covering the entire period since 1864, and they are arranged in a similar manner to those for England and Wales.

CHAPTER 6
Census Returns

Along with civil registration certificates, census returns are the other vital genealogical source for tracing people in the nineteenth century. Since they cover an entire household at a time, they enable you to extend and broaden your family tree to include the extended family. This chapter will explain what census records are, what they contain, how to find them and extract their information, and various ways of using this data to start other lines of research.

Although there had been sporadic population surveys at various times in this country (such as the Domesday Book, commissioned in the late eleventh century by William the Conqueror), it was not until the introduction of the census in the early nineteenth century that collecting detailed information about the size and nature of the country’s population became a regular event. Censuses are of vital importance to a genealogist because they provide snapshots of entire families at a particular moment in time, linking relatives and different generations together in the same household as well as providing information about where they lived, their social status and their line of work.

The first census was conducted for England, Wales, the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands and Scotland in 1801 and there have been censuses conducted every 10 years since that date (except in 1941 due to the Second World War). Censuses started in Ireland a bit later, from 1821. The decision to collect the information followed much debate and controversy in Parliament, as many people feared the process could infringe individual freedoms and liberties. The surveys were not intended for family history purposes and their usefulness in this sphere was realized only later.

‘Censuses provide snapshots of entire families at a particular moment in time.’

The censuses for 1801 to 1831 were simple headcounts, which were used to produce accurate population figures and trends for the country. Indeed, the census for 1801 was primarily conducted in response to the threat of invasion during the Napoleonic Wars as an attempt by the government to ascertain how many potential soldiers would be available for conscription. Interestingly, however, the census returns for 1821 and 1831 for a very small minority of places contain more detailed information other than simple headcounts, with the names of the head of each household included, as happened in Hackney, London, for example. This was for no other reason than the enthusiasm of the people who went round collecting the information – little-known men such as Richard Stopher, who lived in the Suffolk village of Saxmundham most of his life and added notes to his census returns based on his local knowledge of the village’s occupants.

In 1840 the responsibility for collecting census information became part of the remit of the General Register Office (GRO) and subsequent censuses contain more details. From 1841 the censuses started listing the names of everyone in each household, and after 1851 even more detailed information was provided, including exact place of birth (providing researchers with the vital clue to trace these people further back in time). For reasons of privacy, censuses are not released into the public domain for 100 years. Hence, it is currently possible to view all returns only up until 1901.

The census for 1911 was released to the public in its entirety on 3 January 2012. However, due to the passing of the Freedom of Information Act (2000), the Information Commissioner ruled in 2006 that people were entitled to view parts of the census information now upon request. Currently The National Archives (TNA) holds all census returns, and will answer specific requests relating to particular addresses (it is not possible to do a name search) using its paid research service. TNA also hopes to offer a comprehensive searchable service for the census from 2009 onwards. However, this will exclude certain personal information (such as mental deficiencies or handicaps) until 2012.

Ireland has also released its censuses for 1901 and 1911. Unfortunately, however, no full censuses exist for Ireland prior to 1901 as they were destroyed in 1922 by a fire in the General Register Office in Dublin during the Irish Civil War. Those wishing to trace their Irish ancestors will have to rely on other sources for the nineteenth century, such as the Griffiths’ Valuation.

How Census Information was Collected

Censuses record all residents living in a particular property on one specific night (which varied depending on which census is being viewed – see below). A week or sometimes a couple of days prior to the given date, census enumerators would deliver census forms to each household within their enumeration district. The head of the household was obliged to fill in the required information as accurately as possible and the enumerator would then collect the forms the day after census night. As illiteracy levels were high in the nineteenth century, the enumerator would often assist the head of the household in filling out the forms.

Making the Most of Census Returns

Most census returns show us the names of everybody in a household, usually including how they are related to one another, their ages, occupations, places of birth and where they lived. Combining this material with that of civil registration certificates and parish registers gives you a fuller picture of your family’s background, so that you can see how their occupations changed over time, how they migrated around the country, as well as giving you a better idea of how each generation interacted as a family. You might want to use the information gathered from these sources to locate the addresses where your ancestors lived and see if their houses still stand.

Research hints

The data found on census returns can be used to narrow down searches using other records:

1. If you know from your great-grandfather’s birth certificate that his parents must have married before 1899, you can immediately reduce the number of years you have to search for their marriage if you find the family on the 1901 census and work out that their eldest child was born around 1892. You can then start searching for their marriage back from 1892 rather than 1899.

2. Deaths can also be traced with the help of census returns. If you find a couple living together on one census but on a census return taken ten years later one spouse is missing and the other is listed as a widow or widower, you will know to conduct a ten-year death search for that period.

3. Use the details given on the census returns to corroborate information found on certificates. Check the addresses, ages and relationships on the returns to see if they match those given on civil registration certificates of a similar date. Equally, if you find part of your family living in a particular town on the census returns, you should find out what civil registration district that town was covered by so that you can look out for that place when locating those ancestors in the birth, marriage and death indexes.

The next step would be for the enumerator to use these ‘schedules’ and transfer the gathered information into his ‘enumerator’s book’. He would also record which houses lay uninhabited within his district. These completed books would be checked by a supervisor and then sent to London to allow the statisticians to compile the information they wished. It is these enumeration books that form the census records now available for the general public to view. Unfortunately, the original forms completed by each household were destroyed.

As the records are handwritten, the returns often have the enumerator’s notes alongside the entries, sometimes obscuring the actual information. An important notation to bear in mind is the practice of separating each household by slashes on the top left corner of the head of the household’s name. A single slash on top of the name would indicate a separate household within the same property and a double slash separate households in different properties. These slashes are particularly useful when individual house numbers have not been noted.

The information on the census was organized by distinct registration districts for England, Wales and Scotland. These were initially identical to the registration districts created in 1837 for civil registration purposes, based on existing Poor Law Unions that had been set up in 1834. Each registration district was a subdivision of a county and its size was dependent on population. These registration districts would be divided into smaller sub-districts and the sub-districts would be further divided into individual enumeration districts. The size of the enumeration district was an estimate of how many houses the enumerator could visit in one day. Inevitably, enumeration districts would be geographically larger in rural areas where the population was less dense. Additionally, each enumeration district book would have a cover page giving in detail the area and exact roads included in the district, along with parish, hamlet, village, town or county details.

These enumeration districts were roughly the same for the years 1841 to 1891 in order to make valid comparisons of data collected on specific censuses. However, the large increase in population and the industrialization of urban areas meant it was not always possible to adhere to this. Any such alteration would be recorded in the summaries of the returns, so it is worth looking at these cover pages if you want to find out more about the area in which your family lived – an important part of your work, if you remember the advice about historical context from Section One!

‘Census returns add real colour, as they provide additional information besides biographical data which allows you to investigate the social history surrounding your ancestors’ lives.’

England and Wales: Census Returns 1841–1901
Information Contained on the 1841 Census

The first detailed census was taken on Sunday, 6 June 1841, and recorded every individual that spent the night in a property; therefore family visitors and boarders would be recorded as living in that property, and not at their permanent place of residence. The format of the form was a two-sided columned page, with information running across the top of the page that stated the hamlet, village or borough plus parish details on the right-hand side. Both pages would have the following columns recording information about:

• Place: This would usually be the street, with occasionally the house name or number. However, house numbers were rarely recorded.

• Houses: Uninhabited or building / inhabited: The enumerator would mark each new house on the street. He was also expected to indicate where a house was uninhabited.

• Names of each person who abode there the preceding night: It was common for middle names to be unrecorded. As stated above, each person who had slept in the property on that night had to be accounted for. No relationship to the head of the household was given and it is not always possible to work out family relationships.

• Age and sex: Ages of children up to the age of 15 years were recorded accurately. However, adults’ ages above 15 were usually rounded down to the nearest five years. Hence, an individual whose given age appears as 40 could, in fact, be aged anything from 40 to 44 years old.

• Profession, trade, employment or of independent means: This could be misleading as in the nineteenth century people would often have more than one occupation and not every job was noted. The abbreviation ‘M.S.’ or ‘F. S.’ was for male or female servants.

• Born: whether born in the same county? Whether born in Scotland, Ireland or Foreign Parts: This is the closest information relating to place of birth provided. It would simply state whether an individual was born in the same county as the one they lived in, or in Scotland, Ireland or ‘foreign parts’. These would be abbreviated as ‘S.’, ‘I.’ or ‘F.’ accordingly. The abbreviation ‘NK’ may also be used for ‘not known’. Although in rural areas people tended to be living in the parish of birth, this would by no means be universal (especially in urban areas), and hence finding a birth or baptism record would be difficult from the information provided here.

Two other problems are worth bearing in mind when searching this census. First, unlike later censuses, the original enumerator books were filled in using pencil not pen. Thus many pages have now become faded and can be difficult to read (especially the microfilm copies that are often held in county record offices). Secondly, there are some counties where the returns do not survive in their entirety. A complete list of missing and incomplete returns can be found online at www.ancestry.co.uk (see below).

Archive References for the 1841 Census

Every census return now has a modern archive reference, based on the government department that had responsibility for organizing the census at the time it was carried out. The original returns are now held at The National Archives at Kew, and no matter where you are viewing the returns – at TNA, a county archive or online – the archive references form an important part of either finding the correct return or creating your own referencing system when you download information from the Internet into your own files. Wherever archive references appear in this book, they will be accompanied by an explanation of what they mean, and how you should use them in your notes or files. Further information about locating census returns follows shortly.

The 1841 census had a different form of organization and referencing than later censuses and was not based simply on registration districts. It was administered by the Home Office, and has been given TNA series classification HO 107. Individual parishes in each county were grouped together into hundreds, and the census returns were subsequently sorted by county on an alphabetical basis, then by hundred, and lastly by parish. These hundreds were given unique piece numbers, which you can see on the scanned reference slip that appears alongside each census image, either online or on the relevant microfilm.

Each enumeration district was grouped together to form books. Each book would contain approximately five or six enumeration districts and would also have a unique number, given after the piece number on the reference slip. The books themselves would be broken down further, by folio number and individual page number. Folio numbers were stamped on every other page before the returns were microfilmed. Page numbers were printed on the original returns along with the columns.

Thus an example of an 1841 census reference would be HO 107/910/2 whereby HO 107 would signify the 1841 census, 910 would be the piece number (in this case Condover hundred in Shropshire) and 2 the book number. The next relevant number would be the folio number and lastly the page number. However, the latter two would not be on the reference slip itself.

Information Contained on the 1851–1901 Censuses

These six census returns all record roughly the same pieces of information and can be grouped together. The dates the censuses were taken moved from June to either March or April, depending on the census:

• 1851 census: Sunday, 30 March 1851

• 1861 census: Sunday, 7 April 1861

• 1871 census: Sunday, 2 April 1871

• 1881 census: Sunday, 3 April 1881

• 1891 census: Sunday, 5 April 1891

• 1901 census: Sunday, 31 March 1901

Far more information was provided, giving precise birth details along with relationships to heads of households. Although not intended for genealogical research, the information is vital for anyone trying to trace their ancestors during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The top of the page has parish, hamlet and township details along with the relevant borough. The columns are roughly the same for all censuses between 1851 and 1901, and are explained below:

• Number of house, indenture or schedule: This is not to be confused with the house number, but is the number of the property being assessed in the enumeration district.

• House inhabited or uninhabited / building: This question was omitted in 1851 but included afterwards.

• Name of street, place, or road, and name or number of house: As stated, the number or house name is provided along with the street. Unlike the 1841 census, house numbers and names were meant to be provided.

From 1861: Road, street etc., and no. or name of house: More complete details of the address of the property were included from 1861, though many houses simply didn’t have a number or name; details are likely to be more complete for urban areas.

• Name and surname of each person who abode in the house on the night: By 1851, it was more usual for the middle name to be included or, at least, the middle initial, making it easier to identify the correct individual. As mentioned previously, every person who had spent the night in the dwelling place was recorded, regardless of whether it was their usual place of residence.

• Relationship to head of household: This is an additional column compared to the 1841 census, which is very useful for genealogical research. It detailed how each person in the household was related to the head of the household and so helps place people accurately on the family tree. It is not uncommon to find a niece or aunt or grandfather living in the household, thereby giving extra clues about your ancestors. It is also possible to identify how many servants were in the household as they were also noted separately, which gives an indication of social status.

• Marital condition: This column denotes whether the individual was single, married or widowed. Sometimes unmarried people were simply listed as U, with married people denoted M or Mar.

• Age: The ages were no longer rounded down and therefore should be more accurate. Bear in mind, however, that some individuals would not remember their ages with complete accuracy and so there can be errors, with a margin of a year or two either way.

From 1881 to 1901: Age at last birthday: This was intended to make the age data more accurate.

• Sex: Denotes the gender of the individual, usually given as M or F.

• Rank, profession or occupation: What the occupation of the individual was. Children at school would be noted down as ‘scholars’.

From 1891 to 1901: Employer, employed or neither: This was intended to establish statistical information on the nature of Britain’s working population. You will often see the number of employees that worked for an employer noted here.

From 1901: Whether the individual was working at home: New information to ascertain how many people still worked at home, and the numbers who regularly went to a place of work.

• Where born: People were required to note down exactly where they were born, usually stating the parish of birth. This information enables current researchers to find the birth or baptism details of those born prior to the onset of civil registration in 1837 and, therefore, to trace back the family tree further still.

• Whether blind or deaf and dumb: Such physical disabilities were to be noted.

From 1871 to 1901: Imbecile, idiot or lunatic: Additional disabilities were to be included.

• From 1891: Language: Anyone in Wales or Monmouthshire was required to state whether they spoke English only, Welsh only, or English and Welsh (listed as ‘both’).

From 1901: Language: The language spoken section was extended to the Isle of Man census.

As well as information on people living in households across the country, people in various residential institutions – schools, prisons, workhouses, hospitals and asylums – were also noted, though to preserve the anonymity of some of these categories, initials only were used instead of full names, making it tricky to identify a relative who you feel might be away from home. Data on the crews of ships docked in British ports are also included in the returns, as are soldiers in barracks and sailors in naval bases, establishments and ships in port.

Archive References for the 1851–1901 Censuses
1.1851 census

The same prefix code as the 1841 census is used, HO 107 (a National Archives reference). Registration districts were now used and were further divided into smaller sub-districts. The returns were organized by registration district. Each sub-district was given a piece number to follow on from HO 107. The first piece numbers were for the London area and then they were organized on a rough south-to-north basis. After all of England had been allocated piece numbers, subsequent ones were allocated for Wales and then the Isle of Man and, lastly, the Channel Islands. Each county, depending on its size, could include numerous piece numbers.

There was also a folio and page numbering system similar to the one mentioned for 1841. Once a new enumeration district started within a sub-district the page numbers would start from number 1 again. The reference slip is now on the bottom of a page and an example of a reference would be HO 107/2036. HO 107 is the standard reference and 2036 would be the piece number for the registration district of Stourbridge in Worcestershire. To find the exact page you need the folio and page number, although this is not be found on the reference slip itself, but on the top of the census return page. The folio page was stamped on every other page and the page number was printed on every page.

2.1861 census

From 1861 onwards the TNA prefix is different. Instead of ‘HO 107’, each census return is prefixed with ‘RG’ (Registrar General) and, depending on the year of the census, an appropriate number. Hence, for 1861, each census return has the initial prefix RG 9, the number 9 signifying the year 1861.

Other than that, the numbering system is similar to that of 1851. Each registration district was given a unique piece number and these numbers were organized on a similar geographical basis as those of 1851 (with the returns for London coming first). The reference slip is found at the side of the page; a typical one would be RG 9/602 where RG 9 would signify the 1861 census and 602 would represent registration district 85 for Brighton. Again for a complete reference you would need the appropriate folio and page number (described above).

3.1871 census

The referencing system is the same as that used in 1861. The only difference is the first prefix is now RG 10, signifying it is the 1871 census.

4.1881 census

Again, the referencing system is the same as used in the previous three censuses. The TNA prefix is now RG 11, as it is the 1881 census.

The 1881 census for England, Wales, Scotland, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man was fully transcribed by the Church of Latter Day Saints in the 1980s. The Church has made access to this census in particular free of charge on its website, www.familysearch.org.

5.1891 census

The referencing system is the same as the previous censuses, RG 12 being the appropriate prefix code for this series.

The request for information about the employment status of individuals, where appropriate, was first made in this census. Additionally a column has been added detailing the number of rooms that were occupied in the dwelling house if less than five.

6.1901 census

This is the last publicly available census until the release of the majority of the information in the 1911 census in 2009. The appropriate prefix for this collection is RG 13.

Accessing Census Collections for England and Wales

As already mentioned, the original householders’ schedule forms were destroyed for 1841 to 1901. The original enumerator books, which form the census returns, are held at TNA for England, Wales, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man. The census returns for Scotland and Ireland (discussed below) are held at their appropriate record offices.

The census returns for 1841 to 1901 have all been microfilmed and it is these microfilmed versions that are available to view. However, a far easier way to access and view census returns is via the Internet, as the records have been digitized by different commercial websites that offer access to them for a fee. Below are details of the many different ways you can access the censuses.

The National Archives

All census returns from 1841 to 1901 are available, free of charge, at TNA in its reading rooms at Kew, South West London, on microfilm or microfiche. Reference guides, leaflets and indexes are available to help you locate the relevant TNA reference. Online access to the returns for 1841–91 via TNA’s commercial partner Ancestry is also available in the reading rooms for free, though you have to pay for any copies you make. You can also search the 1901 census database for free, though access to the actual digital images still costs money. The 1881 census has been fully transcribed, and an index is available in the reading rooms. Parts of the 1851 census have been indexed by family history societies, and these indexes are also available.

Local Record Offices and Archives

As the censuses were microfilmed, many local libraries, record offices, family history societies and archives were able to purchase copies that cover the local vicinity. Most of these institutions will only have information for the relevant county or place, but they will also have useful local indexes that might not be available nationally, particularly if they were prepared by a family history society. These will include many local projects to catalogue and index the 1851 census, as well as the complete 1881 census index. Some indexes for the 1841 census are also available, and some companies have produced CD ROMs for local census returns for 1861 and 1871, and for 1891 as well. Additionally, staff will have specialized knowledge of the census for their area and can inform you of any missing areas. They will usually be available on microfiche or film and may suit people who are not IT literate.

‘Local record offices will have useful local indexes that might not be available nationally.’

Online

There are many commercial genealogical websites on the market, most of which have indexes and digital copies of the census online, although they are seldom free of charge. Here is a list of the most complete collections:

• www.ancestry.co.uk This is one of the largest genealogical websites, with numerous databases, including a comprehensive census collection for England, Wales, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man from 1841 to 1901. It is a payable service, either by a monthly/annual subscription or a pay-per-view system. Each census has an index and hence it is possible to do simple name searches (including various other details if required) when conducting a search. It is possible to search the index for free, although viewing the entire entry can only be done at a cost. Additionally, the index for the 1881 census can be searched in its entirety without cost as it has been previously transcribed (see above). It is through Ancestry that TNA provides access to the census records onsite. Another useful aspect of the census collection of Ancestry is that it details missing or incomplete registration districts for the 1841, 1851 and 1861 censuses. Hence, if you think you know where your ancestor should have been living, you can run a check against the list if you are having difficulties finding the individuals.

• www.1901censusonline.com This was the first website to offer a census online in collaboration with TNA. It was a joint venture to release the 1901 census for England and Wales in January 2002 (after the 100 years closure period). However, the website now offers searches for all other censuses apart from 1881. The index is free to search although payment is required to view the original record. You can search by name and the website also offers other useful search functions. For example you can search by address, vessel (Royal Naval ships amongst other things) or institution (such as a hospital or prison). To view the original images you will have to purchase pay-per-view vouchers from the website.

• www.findmypast.com Formerly concerned with providing access to birth, marriage and death indexes, Find My Past has a growing collection of censuses. At the time of going to print it was possible to search the 1841, 1861, 1871 and 1891 censuses for England and Wales free of charge, although viewing the transcriptions or the originals costs a number of units which have to be purchased in advance.

• www.origins.net This is another large commercial genealogical website, with a number of databases, including census collections for England and Wales. Its census collection is not complete, however. At the time of print it covered 1841 and 1861 in their entirety, but its database for the 1871 census was incomplete, only covering certain counties (listed individually on the website). Again it is a payable service and it is only possible to do a very simple search without first subscribing.

• www.rootsweb.ancestry.com This is the sister site to www. freebmd.org.uk that provides transcriptions of the national GRO birth, marriage and death indexes for free, and this site for census returns works on the same principle. It is run by a team of volunteers who are transcribing various parts of the census free in an attempt to make as much information available on the website without cost to the researcher. It is an ongoing project working on particular counties of England, Scotland and Wales for all censuses from 1841 to 1891. No census has been completely transcribed but the website does provide a graph showing which counties are covered for each census, along with the percentage of coverage for each county. The project is constantly recruiting volunteers to assist with the process.

Troubleshooting: What to Do If You Can’t Find Your Ancestor

It can be difficult trying to find your ancestor on the appropriate census, even if you’re pretty certain that they should be there. Here are a few reasons why you may experience problems and solutions to help you overcome these.

Data Wrongly Indexed or Transcribed

This is by far the most common reason for difficulties in locating an ancestor. It could be that, in cases of illiteracy, the enumerator at the time had to interpret and record the information given to him by the head of the household. There was no other way of verifying this data and therefore inaccuracies would not have been picked up.

Additionally, most of the websites listed above have created their own name indexes and searchable databases for the census returns, and errors may have crept in whilst compiling these resources. There are several reasons why this might have happened, ranging from the poor condition of the original returns to the difficulty that the modern transcriber faces in reading nineteenth-century handwriting. Bear in mind all possible variant spellings of forenames and surnames and how easily some letters can be confused for each other. For example, if your ancestor’s surname was ‘Parker’, it could easily have been indexed as ‘Barker’, ‘Darker’ or even ‘Porker’. Lateral thinking is often needed in overcoming such mis-indexing.

CASE STUDY
Bill Oddie pt 1

Bill Oddie’s family tree was examined for the first series of Who Do You Think You Are? The story primarily focused on his search for information about his mother, and why she disappeared from his life when he was a child. However, another part of the programme examined conditions facing other members of his family as they grew up in the industrial North West. Key to this storyline was Bill’s grandfather, Wilkinson Oddie, who was born in 1864 and worked in cotton mills for most of his life. His marriage certificate of 1907 was tracked down, when his age was given as 42 and he was described as a widower. This information permitted a search of the 1901 census, based on the fact that he would have been 36 at the time and possibly living with his first wife, in the hope of finding out more about his background.

The search concentrated on census returns in or around Rochdale, where he was living in 1907 at the time of his second marriage to Emily Hawksworth. Initially, no reference to Wilkinson Oddie could be found; however, there was a Wilkinson Oddy of the right age in the right place, and further investigation of earlier census returns in 1891, along with a check of relevant civil registration documents for his birth and first marriage, showed that this was indeed the correct person. Clearly, the census enumerator had written down a phonetic version of his name, transcribing Oddie as Oddy. This highlights one of the most common pitfalls when working with census records – you can’t rely solely on a surname, but have to incorporate all sorts of other data such as age, place of birth and occupation.

The return for 1901 showed that he was listed as a widower, living with his children Betsy, aged 12, John 9 and Mary 7 in their house in Castle Court, Rochdale. Wilkinson was a cotton loom weaver – as was Betsy. This information allowed a search for his first marriage prior to 1889, when Betsy was born, and for the death certificate of his wife after 1894, when his youngest child Mary was born.

The relevant certificates were quickly located thanks to this data, and showed that in 1888 Wilkinson Oddie married Cecilia Heneghan, a 21-year-old cotton weaver. She died in 1897 aged 31 and the cause of death shows it was a result of childbirth, a common danger at that time.

Once you’ve found an ancestor on one census return, it should be possible to locate them on earlier ones. Therefore, given the amount of information already gleaned about Wilkinson Oddie, it was fairly easy to locate him, aged 16, living at home with his parents in 1881. They were John Oddie (listed as Oddy in the census records) and his wife Mary. Wilkinson lived at home with six siblings, the oldest being 21 and the youngest only 1 month old.

By repeating this pattern, it was possible to track down John Oddie in earlier census returns as well, such as 1851. He was found living at home in Over Darwen, Blackburn, aged 15 and already working in a cotton mill, with his parents Wilkinson Oddie senior, aged 41, and his wife Mary. Wilkinson Oddie senior was born in Mitton, Yorkshire, in about 1811, and armed with this information a further search of parish registers was possible to locate earlier branches of the family.

Always remember that there have been many stages that the data has gone through to reach your computer screen and errors could have occurred at each step. If you have a valid street address for your ancestor, perhaps from a certificate, it may be worthwhile searching microfilms manually under this address if you are having difficulties locating your ancestor online.

Inaccurate Information Provided by Ancestors

It was not uncommon for ancestors to provide inaccurate details when filling in the schedule forms. This could be for a variety of reasons:

• A different name was given. Although your ancestor’s official name might have been Jennifer Sarah Marks, she could have been commonly known as Sally and be recorded under that name. People could always use their middle names as their first names or vice versa. Check both if you are having problems.

• Ages were inaccurate. Sometimes teenagers would register as older than they were so that they could work at an earlier age than was legal. Other times, people would give younger ages for reasons of vanity (especially when there were large age gaps in marriages). Alternatively, people might simply not remember their exact year of birth.

• Covering up family secrets. The most common secret a family might wish to conceal would be illegitimacy, and information might have been tweaked to hide this. For example a child may appear to be a year or two younger on the census than was the case, to mask a birth outside wedlock. Another possibility is an untruthful relationship, whereby an illegitimate grandchild of the head of the household may be recorded as their child to avoid scandal.

Bear all this in mind when searching for your ancestor. Most of the search facilities on the various websites allow people to filter the results with as much or as little detail as possible so you can allow for such inaccuracies when searching.

Your Ancestor Was Not Recorded on the Census

Although the theory was that every person living in the country at the time should be recorded, sometimes people slipped through the net. The early censuses attracted much suspicion as to why the state needed to record such personal information in the first place. Consequently people were often very reluctant to fill out the relevant forms. For example, a census return for Westminster in 1841 includes a margin note written by the enumerator stating that the head of the household refused to provide any information.

There may always be a simple explanation, in the sense that they were simply not present at home on the night the enumerator came to collect the forms, and failed to fill out a form where they were staying. Of course, the opposite is true as well, and some people appear more than once in the same census – once at their formal place of residence, and another at their lodgings whilst travelling around the country.

Additionally, babies and young children may be omitted as some parents felt that information should not be provided until the child was baptized. Alternatively, parents may not have detailed every child to avoid accusations of overcrowding. There is also the factor of human error; where enumerators had to record the information themselves (in cases of illiteracy) they may have simply missed the odd person out, particularly at the end of a long day tramping through the streets of the parish meeting hostile and suspicious householders!

Missing Census Returns

Unfortunately, census returns for certain districts have not survived to the present day for various reasons. If every other search has failed, check to ensure that the return for your sub-district does survive. Ancestry’s website has a list of missing census returns for the early censuses (1841 to 1861). Otherwise, check with your local record office. Of course, you need to be sure your ancestor was living in that area in the first place. Sometimes, people would be visiting relatives on census day and would not be recorded in their home town anyway.

‘Although every person should be listed on the census, people did slip through the net.’

Don’t forget that there might be another reason your ancestor isn’t listed at home – they might be residing in a school, workhouse, prison or ship, or perhaps had enlisted in the army or navy, in which case they could be located far away from their place of birth.

Census Returns for Scotland

Censuses were taken in Scotland on a similar basis to England and Wales from 1801 onwards. Scotland was divided into registration districts and sub-districts and enumerators were responsible for circulating and collecting the schedule forms. The enumerators would then enter the information into the census return books, which form the Scottish census returns that you can see today.

The original returns are now held at the GROS in Edinburgh. These records are also subject to 100-year closure rules. Nevertheless, it is possible to view the returns from 1841 to 1901 at GROS, which has computerized indexes for these returns for the entire period along with some other indexes, such as street indexes for certain areas and some privately produced indexes. As microfilm and fiche copies were made of the original returns, various local archives, record offices and libraries will hold copies for their area as well, so a trip to Edinburgh might not be necessary.

The returns are also available online on the following websites:

• www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk This is the main website for those conducting genealogical research in Scotland, being the official government source of genealogical data. Most of the key sources have been placed here, including all publicly available census returns for Scotland. The information is not free of charge, although you can search the databases after registering for free. However, you will have to pay to view the results and see digital images.

• www.ancestry.co.uk Ancestry has also placed Scottish data on its website. At the time of writing, searchable indexes for all census returns from 1841 to 1901 were available. These indexes relate to transcriptions of the original entries on the forms. It is not possible to view a copy of the original entry, only the transcription.

‘Most of Ireland’s early census records were destroyed by a fire in 1922.’

Census Returns for Ireland

The process of producing census returns for Ireland began slightly later, in 1821, and they were compiled every ten years subsequently. Unfortunately, most of the records were destroyed during the Civil War in 1922. Very little now survives for the nineteenth century. However, the returns for 1901 and 1911 are available and survive in their entirety.

Nineteenth-century Returns

The small proportion of census returns that do survive for this period can be found at the National Archives of Ireland, Dublin. They are organized county by county and some name indexes for certain counties have been prepared. Local county record offices may have copies of surviving records for their local area and it is worthwhile contacting these institutions first.

1901 and 1911 Census Returns

As mentioned, both these returns are already available to the public and there are plans to make them available online from late 2008 onwards. Details can be found on the National Archives of Ireland website.

The records were collected on a similar basis to those of England, Scotland and Wales; forms were duly completed by the head of the household and given to the enumerator to compile the returns. There is no complete name index for the entire country and the records are organized by Poor Law Union, district, parish and town. Hence, it is necessary to have an approximate idea of where your ancestor was living before you can search.

The returns contain all the details that are to be found in their English, Welsh and Scottish counterparts, as well as additional information. The 1901 census provides details about the condition of the house in which your ancestor was resident, as well as their religious denomination. The 1911 census also includes information on how long women had been married and the number of children born of this marriage that were still alive.

The census records can be found for the whole of Ireland until 1921 at the National Archives in Dublin, which also holds the census returns for the Republic of Ireland post 1921, though they are not yet open for public inspection. The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Belfast, has the census returns for the six counties prior to partition and also after 1921, though these later records are similarly closed to the public. Additionally, local centres should have copies of returns for their particular area.

USEFUL INFO

Griffiths’ Valuation

Although the census records for Ireland before 1901 were largely destroyed in 1922, there is one resource still available that can be used to partly fill in the gaps – the Primary Valuation, more commonly known as the Griffiths’ Valuation after the director of the Irish Valuation Office of the time, Richard Griffiths. It is a survey of property throughout all Ireland covering the period 1848–64, and was used to determine the amount of tax each person should pay towards the support of the poor in each Poor Law union at a time when the Irish Famine was at its worst. The returns cover every household, building and land, listing everyone who paid rates – with the name of the occupier and owner (if rented) included for private property and houses, making it an important way of establishing where a family lived. They are arranged by barony and civil parish with indexes to the townlands covered in each volume. Index volumes and returns can be seen at the National Archives of Ireland, as well as copies in regional research centres; whilst access online is via www.origins.net.

CHAPTER 7
Parish Records

The third of the four main sources that genealogists use are ecclesiastical records generated at local level by parish churches and various other religious organizations. Registers of baptisms, marriages and burials contain some biographical information that you can use to extend your family tree further back in time – theoretically to the sixteenth century, when parish registers were first introduced. This chapter explains what the records are, how you can use them, and where they can be found. It also lists some of the non-conformist records generated by religious groups outside the authority of the Church of England.

It is possible to make significant progress in building your family tree using the two sources discussed in the previous chapters – civil registration certificates and census records. However, if you want to work further back in time, pre-nineteenth century, you will have to turn to records generated at a local level, not by the State but by the Church. Together, these sources are loosely described as ‘parish registers’ and they record key events in a person’s life, such as baptism, marriage and burial. Since parish registers were introduced in the mid-sixteenth century, and continue to the present day, they are one of the longest continuous sets of record available – though a large degree of luck is required to find an ancestor in the earliest surviving registers.

‘Parish records are among the longest continuous sets of records available.’

Historically, Christian Britain was divided into dioceses, each administered by a bishop and consisting of smaller territorial sub-divisions known as parishes. A parish is a geographical unit under the administration of a local priest or pastor, and they have existed in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland since the end of the sixth century. By the nineteenth century, England and Wales had approximately 11,000 parishes, varying considerably in size and population. Although there have almost always been religious minorities such as Jews in England, the vast majority of the population belonged to the Established Church of England from the sixteenth century onwards, when the country broke away from the authority of the Papacy in Rome. Those Christian minorities that did not thereafter subscribe to the Established Church, for example Quakers and Roman Catholics, came to be known as ‘non-conformists’. They remained small in number until the nineteenth century, in part due to the persecution they faced. Surviving records for these non-conformist groups will be discussed separately below.

HOW TO …

… make the most of parish registers

1. Prior to the commencement of civil registration, parish registers that recorded baptisms, marriages and burials on a local level are our only way of confirming the births, marriages and deaths of our ancestors. These can be more difficult to trace, because there is not one centralized index and you usually need to know which parish your family was living in to be able to locate their entries. Parish registers also contain less detailed information than civil registration certificates, making it more challenging to compare details from record to record. Nevertheless, the fact these registers survive for some parishes as far back as the sixteenth century means there is a wealth of information about your ancestors waiting to be discovered, with a little patience and determination!

2. If you find civil registration documents for your ancestors that do not give the information you were expecting to find, it may be worth looking for the parish register of whichever religious ceremony would have marked the event to see if the two records corroborate one another.

Parish Records of the Church of England

In 1538, Henry VIII’s chancellor Thomas Cromwell introduced legislation that required every priest to record all baptisms, marriages and burials within his parish, and it is these surviving records that enable genealogists to trace their ancestors beyond the start of the great record series of the nineteenth century – civil registration certificates and census returns. Few records survive this far back – on average, most English parishes have records that start around 1611 though there are some examples in Wales from 1541 – because many of the early records were not kept with any degree of care, being written on loose sheets of paper which have not survived the passage of time. A further royal proclamation was issued in 1558 instructing that these parochial events be written on parchment rather than loose paper, which increased the chances of survival; therefore 1558 is generally recognized as the start date of parish registers.

Another Act of Parliament, passed in 1597, is also important as it led to the birth of what are known as ‘Bishops’ Transcripts’. As well as compiling their own parish registers, local clergy were instructed to make annual copies of each register and send them to the bishop of the diocese in which they served. Therefore these are very useful duplicate copies of the original parish registers and can be used as an alternative if the original does not survive (or is partly or wholly illegible). However, Bishops’ Transcripts sometimes contained less detail than parish registers, or recorded slightly different information, so it is worthwhile examining both sources where possible.

There are other factors to consider when viewing the earliest registers. Other than the possibility that they may no longer be legible (ink may have faded or pages rotted), early registers were usually written in Latin. However, this shouldn’t cause too many problems. The nature of the information is fairly formulaic and is usually contained in a single sentence. Moreover, most archives have Latin dictionaries that enable you to translate words such as calendar months into English, as well as Latin versions of English names.

Another point to bear in mind is that the modern Gregorian calendar was adopted in the mid-eighteenth century instead of the old Julian calendar. Until 1752 the New Year did not begin on 1 January but 25 March. Hence, for example, all events occurring after 31 December 1675 to 24 March of the following year would belong to the year 1675, even though today we would consider them as belonging to 1676. Genealogists refer to this in their dating by using the formula ‘February 1675/6’.

Further, prior to 1813 there was no uniform method of registering events. Instead, individual clerks recorded information in their own unique ways and consequently the amount of information contained in parish registers varies considerably. Some parishes kept separate registers for baptisms, marriages and burials, whereas others prepared annual registers recording all these events together. The Rose Act was passed in 1813 and from this date all baptisms, marriages and burials were written in pre-printed books issued by the ‘King’s Printer’. These books ensured that the same details were recorded by each parish throughout the country. Often there would be more detail than had been recorded previously.

Lastly, do remember that parish registers were still kept after the introduction of civil registration in 1837 and, in theory, should exist to the present day. This is very useful when you are having problems locating events in the national GRO indexes as an equivalent record may be found in the local parish register instead, especially during the early days when civil registration was less popular or thought to be an unnecessary inconvenience.

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