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.
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