Hello to all family historian or those of you wishing to be one
This is the first of, I hope, many blogs designed to help anyone out there to trace their ancestors and find out who they really are. I hope to be able to offer help and guidance but also bring people together who can help each other in similar searches.
I am a history graduate and currently studying for a Master’s with the University of Strathclyde in genealogical, palaeographic and heraldic studies (basically deciphering very old documents and undertaking family history research!). But moreover, I have researched my family history for over 30 years using civil registration, parish records, census returns and many other documents in numerous record offices around the country. Obviously, as time has gone on this has been more and more available online but I still very much believe in the necessity of looking at original documentation that isn’t always available online. Much of my own personal research has been in England but a lot also in Wales and in Norway – who have surprisingly good records.
I have learned, along the way, much about my own family but also so much about history and how people actually lived, the trades they did and how everything differed to the way we live today. Along the way, when I have found another line back, I have loved looking at who was on the throne and what was going on in national and international history and politics, wondering what my ancestors though of the goings-on – or maybe they didn’t and just focused on the field they were ploughing!!
I have traced most of my lines back to the 1600’s but since most were little more than agricultural workers so it now gets more difficult to trace much further back but I continue to try. No matter how much we find about our family history, there is always more to find.
But let’s get started and let’s take it totally from a beginner’s point of view as we were all there once!
First of all, you need to find your own birth certificate and then ask relatives for any of their certificates, especially your parent’s births or marriages certificates. From your own birth certificate, if you take a look, you will see that along with your name and date of birth (which you presumably know!) it gives the name of your parents, including your mother’s surname before she married (her maiden name). This then gives you two full names with which to search for a marriage certificate which I will come on to later.
(An example of an English birth certificate, albeit the person was born in China!)
If you don’t know who your father is, it is not necessarily the end of that line of research. If your mother is able to give you information that may help you find a birth record to get a birth certificate. It helps if they had a really unusual name of course and also helps if you know from where they came. Unfortunately, our population today doesn’t necessarily stay in one place so it isn’t always easy to find out where someone was born. Take me for example – I was born in Exeter, Devon, baptised in Nottinghamshire but grew up in Harpenden, Hertfordshire. My parents married in Nottinghamshire but were both from London. So you can see how problematic it all soon becomes. But the answer is always out there. I see it like a jigsaw puzzle – you’re looking for a missing piece. You know it is there somewhere and eventually you will find it if you persevere. In later blogs I will suggest ideas to look for recent records and births and missing fathers (or mothers) including using DNA but for now we will consider the main routes of research for people.
As I said, once you have both of your parent’s names, you can look for their marriage. Now the marriage certificate of your parents will give you their names (obviously!), their ages (the further back you go, the more this isn’t necessarily totally accurate! It can also just state ‘of full age’ – very unhelpful), where they were living at the time of the marriage and who their fathers were. But to find the marriage, if your parents don’t still have a copy and cannot find it, where do you go looking? You need to look in the Civil Registration records. These are basically government official records of events – births, marriages or deaths. They are different to parish records which are baptisms (not births although some do include the date of birth too if you are lucky), marriages (which are much the same) and burials (not deaths though, as with births, they may list the date of death). Civil registration records for England and Wales have all been transcribed and indexed on documents you can search online on freeBMD, Ancestry or a number of other sites (as opposed, again, to parish records which have NOT been nationally transcribed and are not all available online – some are, some aren’t). Any particular year is broken down into four quarters, March, June, September and December.
(On this example you can see that the search was for Ivie McQueen who clearly married a male with the surname ‘McCluskey’ in Lancaster and the reference needed for ordering the marriage certificate was 8e 1761)
So if you go and access the records, you can search for one of your parents’ names and, depending on when it was, this will list the surname of the other party (ie you search for your father’s name and it will list alongside it the maiden name of your mother). You know when you were born so look for a marriage at around that time and hopefully you will find the marriage certificate you need – assuming your parents were married. If they weren’t, it isn’t necessarily a problem. Each action going back is a step and, if there was no marriage or you can’t find a marriage, you can hopefully carry on – just a bigger step and it may take you a little longer. The listing in the index will also give a place name. Bear in mind this isn’t necessarily where they lived. It may, for example, be from where the mother comes – so don’t dismiss it if all the other facts fit.
So when you’ve found the marriage certificate go to www.gov.uk/order-copy-birth-marriage-death-certificate and you can order the certificate here giving the correct references for the online index. There are companies who will do this for you and will charge you more too. There is no reason to buy from them – you’ll get the same certificate from the government website! They cost £12.50 but if you do family history research properly, it does cost money. If you scrimp on certificates, you might end up going down an incorrect path and researching totally the wrong person and you wouldn’t want that.
(An example of an English marriage certificate)
This is for England and Wales. If, however, you are researching in Scotland it is quite different. You need to go onto www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk and, in a similar way, search for the entry that you believe to be your parents in the listing index. But with the Scottish system, you can then pay online (£12 but you can order a paper copy if you prefer) and download it immediately. It’s similar for northern Ireland records but use www.nidirect.gov.yk/services/go-groni-online.
So hopefully by now, you have got together your own birth certificate and your parents’ marriage certificate. Already you have researched back a generation! Well done! But what do you do next?........and that will be on the next blog.
So, I look forward to catching up with you next time to take you history further.
