Help with family tree

[Murphypoint]

I am tracing back my family tree. I am doing ok but struggling to find out about some members.

As an example my great great grandparents had my great grand mother but how can I work out my great grandmothers brothers and sisters, if any? I don’t have any detail at all so I don’t know if this is possible. Thanks.

Depending on the dates, you can look at census data. It is all online these days.

So you can search for the person/area, then find them, then find out who else was at their address. Works well if the census covers the time they were children.

If they were rich enough to leave wills you can search for them.

You can order and use birth certificates to get parents' names. Then search and find marriage certificates, which give fathers names and occupations. etc.

Look for the name of the parents and then cross reference other births they may have had in that time frame. Ancestry, findmypast, myheritage and family search are all brilliant resources, Ancestry in particular is very easy to work through as it makes connections you might not have seen (you just need to verify the information of course!).

If you don't have access to it your local library probably does and your local Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints (LDS/Mormon as commonly known) family history centre certainly does free of charge.

There is a family tree topic on here somewhere, maybe ask MNHQ to move your thread there?

Work backwards from the known to the unknown. Bear in mind though, that sometimes elderly family members will not always know the truth (and sometimes will not be willing to talk about possible scandals like illegitimate births etc). With the help of FreeBMD and the census records, it is possible to go back to the early/mid 1800's.

You can order birth, marriage and death certificates, but buy them either direct from the register office itself or the official GRO website as other sites will charge you more than the standard fee. Marriage certificates are particularly good - as well as telling you full names, you get their marital status on marriage (helpful if a woman was previously widowed for instance), fathers' names are shown as well as witnesses, which are often family members. Once you have names and occupations, you can find them more easily on the censuses and search for siblings etc.

Always make sure that you are referring to the original source records, and not trees posted by other people online, as there may be mistakes in their research that you can then perpetuate.

Most libraries hold regular family history events, and those that don't will probably have staff that are used to helping people find records online on the computers in the library.

Here's the MN Family History topic www.mumsnet.com/Talk/family_history

What detail do you have? Have you found the marriage? If after 1910 ish then freebmd will have the mothers maiden name listed so if fairly uncommon surnames you'd be able to match.

In addition to the above, if your great grandmother was still living with both her parents in the 1911 census, that census would also have recorded how many years her parents had been married and how many children had been born to that marriage, which is useful if you want to know how many other children's birth records you need to track down.