Family Tree Research

[dippingmytoeinagain]

Hello there
As the nights draw in, I'm thinking of picking up my family tree research, which I've dabbled with in the past but kept putting down as I found I got quickly overwhelmed with deciding who to research and how to record all of the information, which resources to use etc.

Is there anyone on here who does family tree research as a hobby who can offer me a few simple starting points and would be able to share what has worked/not worked for you. Organisation tips and so on.

I don't have a paid memberships yet, but will get one once I'm a bit clearer in my own mind as to where I want to go with this one.

I'm usually quite an organised person but I find that this just makes my head spin.

Thanks so much

There was a marvellous thread a little while back about tracing WWI relatives.

It gave lots of excellent links and background, so herewith in case you find it useful: Found my grandad's medal from world war 1

Ooh, cross-posted!

Sounds like you're off to a great start getting everything in order. It will pay such dividends down the line.

That is a brilliant link, thank you Mr Feynman One of the stories that drives me on with my family tree is that of a young family member who died on the first day of the Battle of the Loos. There is a memorial plaque to him in the church where the family live and his name is also recorded on a memorial in on the of graveyards in France. It sounds a bit daft really as I never knew him, nor did any of immediate family, but I want to visit that memorial to touch his name and tell him that he isn't forgotten.

Try googling where your nearest archive or history centre us, not only might they have free access to find my past or ancestry ( more likely if they have records uploaded on either website)

birthplaces!
my gt gran who moved around quite a lot during her life, always said she was born in Berwick on Tweed. It turned out to be a small village called Berwick Hill, near Ponteland.
On the 1901 census I have her daughter born in China. I spent ages pouring over maps of Northumberland and Durham looking for a small village of that name, only to find it was actually Singapore! Dad was in the army, and mum spent a few years abroad with him after they first got married.

Yes ALWAYS check the original record if you can, even census images can be extremely informative. You can often read things that are incredibly useful but have been crossed out or not transcribed. Sometimes on a baptism record there are little margin notes, especially about the father if the birth was illegitimate. In one of my parishes in Kent, the vicar has cross-referenced a lot of baptisms, marriages & burials.

blue Early 20th C, one of my gt grandparents lived in a house in Chelsea, just off the King's Road. It wasn't a particularly good area back then, but that house must be worth several millions now! (Its been converted into flats)

It fascinates me thinking about the living conditions most families had during the 19th & early 20th century. Often 8-10 kids or more, sometimes with granny too, living in a three or four roomed house. No bathroom, sometimes not even running water. We've come a long way in less than 100 years.

As well as free access to FMP & Ancestry via your local library, you can also use the facilities at your local Latter Day Saints family history centre, if there is one near you.

They really won't mention religion or try to convert you or anything.

They have loads of useful resources. You can hire microfilmed church records (where they exist), they have microfilm readers there. There is a catalogue of the records they have available on their website, or you can drop in & ask one of the helpers. Check the opening hours though, as they are staffed by volunteers you may find they only open a few hours a week.

Some great advice here! My own tip would be Google maps. Not only can you save locations and see what the area looks like now, but they can be useful for getting a sense of distance and other places to look. To give an example: one branch of my family came from Cambridgeshire and all originated in a small number of villages that were all within one or two miles of each other. I got completely stuck trying to find any record of one particular ancestor prior to his marriage. However, looking at the area and the locations I'd saved on Google maps, I noticed it was very close to the Suffolk border. I searched there and found his family in a village that while in a different county was only a seven minute walk away from where he spent his adult life.

Wonder if any of you can help me with a query. I'm a keen family tree researcher and have used the Latter Day Saints site to help me. I was invited to do some indexing for them and thought fair enough, it's a free site so I was happy to contribute. I've since been told they new records are in fact being sold to Find My Past and we all have to pay to access. Is this true?

saskia - I use Google maps when research too - very handy for checking how far distances are, esp for earlier records when distance makes a difference

Saskia yes to Maps. We have one branch that lived on the border between England and Wales and that's a nightmare to unpick. I often end up trying to follow roads to see if people could get from x to y. And trying to decipher the spelling of English mangling of Welsh villages is fun.

I like the idea of using maps to record locations - thanks for that idea

Yy about locations.

I had a kerching moment when I spotted the (now defunct) railway line joining a string of villages - essentially turning them into a single location.

Couldn't understand why family members kept moving "away". But they weren't.

Marvellous thread. Thank you all.

Question... A whole load of family records have come into my possession and I'm wondering what to do with them. they go back to mid 1800s and include some mildly notable persons. BMD certs, wills, indentures, medals, letter, etc.

I'm thinking digitise, catalogue and store properly as a starting point, but I think some of them ought to be shared more widely.

At the moment I don't have the family tree going, but this thread has ally piqued my interest again, and I feel a certain sense of duty and responsibility now that I have this bundle of archive stuff.

About transcriptions, ancestry only has transcriptions of Scottish census records and many of these are poorly transcribed. It can be quite funny if you're Scottish and know what's meant but also, obviously frustrating at other times.

I got stuck recently trying to find ancestors from a small village in Fife, Scotland on the 1841 census so eventually tried browsing the records on ancestry only to notice a note saying that those ones had been lost on the way back to Edinburgh!

Nothing is OK

Photograph, file

Then use acid free folders and paper to store the papers and keep somewhere that is unlikely to rapidly change temperature.

You can't put birth, marriage or death certificates online as it's states they can't be reproduced and they can't be published

Penfold007

What records were you indexing? Or what type of records?

After a positive start to the day, I once again have a spinning head and that sense of 'I have no idea what I am doing!' I guess it comes with experience, but at the moment I don't know how to figure out if a connection is a valid one or not, especially when there are slight variations in dates, the way names are presented (it seems dropping 'first' names was common, especially in families like mine where the oldest son gets the same first name as every other oldest son in the line.)

I absolutely don't want to make any assumptions at all, but at the same time, I don't know how to prove who is who. Hmmm....

I'd suggest getting all this data into software. Then you'll get to the point where you can eliminate people.

(If you haven't chosen your genealogy software yet, you can busk it with Word for a while.)

So suppose you've started with 1851 censuses.

Transcribe ALL the likely looking ones. Start a separate record for each little family.

Now do the 1861 censuses. Assign each to one of your previous families.

And so on.

It may all fall into place from there.

If not, use FreeBMD to produce a near-as-dammit list of all the likely births for the people you are focussing on. The % figure in each result tells you what % of records from that quarter have been transcribed. If it's nearly 100% you can start making assumptions from completeness.

You can download your FreeBMD search results as a little file: assign these results to the family members you've already entered, crossing them off as you go.

Repeat with deaths (and, especially for women, marriages as that's how their names disappear).

You'll probably have some dubious cases - you can leave those unassigned or assign with a big ???.

Rinse and repeat with other sources.

Eventually you will come across something where it's clearly Mary SMITH b 1861/1862 dau of John & Helen who is the person in the record.

That means Mary Smith b 1860/1861 dau of Robert & Elizabeth must be the left over person.*

*Or there's an error in the records. So must...ish!

Dipping - If I am uncertain then I tend to have a separate 'trial' tree for that family before putting it in my main tree. I only transfer it to the proper tree one I am certain that it is the correct family. Also I have a system for putting information that I think is probably true but can't yet be proven in capitals in the main tree. That way I know to treat it with caution.

Ivykaty, how come you can't put certificates online? Is it to do with fraud?

Given that you can't share the docs themselves online, what about the names and dates and so on?

ivycat I did some UK ones but the site was pushing USA records.

Nothing you can't put images of certificates online as they are copyright.

You CAN make & publish your own transcript of the information they contain.

Pencils

You transcribed some uk records, OK what where the records about?

Assume records, quarter session records, calendar if prisoner records, tithe map apportionments, private estate records? There are hundreds if thousands of different types of records with the uk and many hundreds if volunteers projects indexing different types of records.

If you can specify what information was held within the records you were indexing I can possibly tell you whether these records have been uploaded onto fmp

Waves back to Vixster, obviously a fellow family history nut

There are so many wonderful records on line now but it can be overwhelming and lead to rushing backwards with the possibilities of making wrong connections. I'm not sure how far you have got but the old advice was always to start with yourself and work backwards one step at a time, in an ideal world you'll be able to find more than one source of information to prove your findings each step of the way ie birth/marriage/death certificates, census, baptism etc.

A small book I found very useful was 'Family History nuts & bolts' by Andrew Todd, it is full of tips and good advice especially in family reconstitution.

Choosing a line with a more unusual surname and following it for a while can make life a little easier & give you practise whilst building your confidence.

It is no coincidence that many of our annual family holidays when the children were young were taken in areas our ancestors came from . We were even know to reward the children with ice-creams for any family graves they found in graveyard hunts. One of my own childhood memories is of playing in the corridor of the Suffolk record office whilst my Mum looked through parish records so this hobby is definitely in my genes.

One of my many exciting finds was stumbling across a very distance cousin on Ancestry and discovering her elderly father had a small painting of my 3xGt grandfather born in 1796 hanging on his wall across the pond in Canada having started its life in London.

The eureka moment of finding a new ancestor or the final piece of the jigsaw to a brick wall cannot be beaten.

Sorry I cannot help too much with suggestions for recording information. I am using an ancient computer programme having tried and ditched several newer versions for being over complex. I also still use folders, files and scraps of paper & back of envelopes when desperate which is not good practise especially when there is a back log in carrier bags waiting to be filed. I resort to rough hand sketches of family trees on paper sometimes to make things clearer in my mind if needed.

OP - what about joining your local family history society, or if you now live in a different part of the country, the one covering the area your ancestors are from?

The societies have often transcribed whole churchyardsful of local headstone inscriptions, war memorials, and things like the last 150 years of cricket club memberships & local dignitaries. There may also be other members who are researching your extended family, and you could actually get in touch with some living distant cousins! They will also have a good idea of which records are available at the local County record office and/or County library.