I have to tell somebody

[Prokupatuscrakedatus]

Nobody in my family is even remotely interested, but I have to tell somebody:

I just found the marriage of Peter Heckmann and Agnes ter Boven on 04.02.1680.
They are my 9th great grandparents.

I started on Ancestry; it guides you through the process and finds information for you which you then have to sift to see if it's relevant. Once you've established a few firm links, it takes you back and back and back. I enjoyed the logic puzzling of it - I found several children who had sadly died before the age of 10 by cross referencing 'children not alive' the 1911 census with FreeBMD to track them down. I don't think my parents, or even their parents, would have known about some of them. I had a few Coco moments! I also found, like PP, that the American/Australian outposts of the family had made a few wild leaps in the dark, probably through simply not knowing the local area as well as I did. It's sobering to realise how much context matters in interpreting the bare facts, and how quickly that sort of contextual understanding evaporates.

You can register for a few months at a time if you don't want to commit to a whole year's subscription, and it's amazing how much you can find out in just a few hours. Beware: it's addictive.

Always go to original source records. Treat Ancestry and trees and hints with great care. Do recommend their DNA testing though.

No. I mean genesreunited and findmypast. Nothing past 2007. No point in paying is there?

But recent records aren't what 99% of the genealogy community are looking for. People start with their parents/grandparents and work back or sideways, not forward in time. The big companies are going to put their effort into providing records people want to see and that's not birth/marriages/deaths post 2007.

That's very cool

Yes, but your other older family members will probably know things like their full names with any middle names, their birthdays, the year they married, where they lived, and might even remember their own grandparents' details too.

When your grandparents passed away, someone would have gone through all their things, and perhaps found their marriage and birth certificates and old photos, things like that. They may also have surviving siblings (your great aunts /uncles) you could talk to.

If there is no family to help you, then you can send away for your grandparents' death certificates, and start with those. You should then be able to have enough information to find their marriages on FreeBMD. Send for those and they will have their fathers' names on, and the maiden names of the bride, their ages and where they were living. Once you know their ages, you can then search for their birth certificates. And so on. You work backwards in time step by step, using certificates, and once you get back far enough you can then start to use census records as well.

That's so exciting!

I've never done a lot of genealogy, but fil has gone back about 400 years with his family, and helped me find my grandparents' marriage certificate, which was minor-ly exciting. There was no doubt that they were married, but nobody knew where.

Well done, that must have taken quite a while.