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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.’
