Starting Your Family History - A Beginner's Guide
Family history is easy to get started, especially if you've still got older generation relatives to pester with questions. The first person you start with, however, is yourself.
Write down all the pertinent facts about you: birthdate & place, who you married and when, the birthdates & names of your children if you have them. Add any sisters or brothers to your list and then start on your parents. You'll need their full names, when they married, when & where they were born, their brothers and sisters, and their parents.
Here's where it starts to get tricky. As your list grows longer it becomes harder to keep track of all the info. A simple way of doing this is to keep records of statistics for each individual on a separate page while also keeping a record of your direct line of ancestry.
You can either invest in family history software, which you can get quite cheap [or expensive, whichever you prefer] or you can do it all on paper. A simple search of family history groups should provide you with resources to either download pages for printing or contact info for your local group. If you can't find a group through an internet search engine, look the old-fashioned way and head to your local library. Family history groups are intimately connected with libraries through their research needs. Most groups have copies of the correct recording pages to give out or sell to researchers.
Once you have the pages in hand you will see that they are quite easy to follow. There are spaces for names, partners, dates, children, occupation, parents and usually space for brief info on the children such as who they marry and any children they might have. Keep your pages together in family groups.
You'll also come across a page that looks more like a family tree starting with one person and ending with slots for up to six people. Fill these out as well.
If you haven't quite figured it out yet, family history research uses lots of paper so you'll need somewhere to store it. Look around for a sturdy suspension file box or cabinet.
You will eventually hit a few snags in your information trail. What you can't get from your parents, grandparents and other relatives, you should be able to get from the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages. These registries issue, for a fee, copies of birth, death and marriage certificates registered with them. Registration of such events hasn't always been compulsory though so once you get back 100 years plus certificates are harder to find.
Record all the info on to your pages [computer or hardcopy] and store the certificate somewhere safe. Each certificate should [but not necessarily] provide you with parent names and occupations, and siblings or issue. As you reach further back in time you may find that some of the names are a little different to what you expected. This may be in spelling only or it may be a completely different name. The information recorded on the certificate depends on the knowledge of the original person providing it. Another common experience is that people have the habit of changing the name they are known by over their life time. For example, my grandmother's name was "Dorothy" but everyone called her "Billie". My great-grandfather's name was "William", yet his officially recorded name is "Willie".
If you are struggling with obtaining all the information on long-dead relatives then take a look at what you do have. Occupations, membership in groups, schools and knowing where they lived or were born, can all unearth more history. Try contacting local history groups and family history groups in the area where your ancestors lived. Research the groups they participated in. One of my greatx2-grandfathers was a member of the Oddfellows Society. The group did, and still does, provide health fund membership. Through research into that group in the local area I found details not only of my direct ancestor but also a number of his brothers, brothers-in-law and father, including when and how some of them died, who they were married to and when they had children.
Hopefully by this stage you have joined your local family history group where you will find plenty of people to help you, resources, and access to further lines of query. Your group may also run courses for beginners and will advertise other courses and workshops you can attend. To research your family history, you need time, patience and a curious mind. Talk to your family and record their stories, but don't take what they say as the whole truth. Investigate everything you can and back up the stories with facts. Truth, like names, changes over time.
Write down all the pertinent facts about you: birthdate & place, who you married and when, the birthdates & names of your children if you have them. Add any sisters or brothers to your list and then start on your parents. You'll need their full names, when they married, when & where they were born, their brothers and sisters, and their parents.
Here's where it starts to get tricky. As your list grows longer it becomes harder to keep track of all the info. A simple way of doing this is to keep records of statistics for each individual on a separate page while also keeping a record of your direct line of ancestry.
You can either invest in family history software, which you can get quite cheap [or expensive, whichever you prefer] or you can do it all on paper. A simple search of family history groups should provide you with resources to either download pages for printing or contact info for your local group. If you can't find a group through an internet search engine, look the old-fashioned way and head to your local library. Family history groups are intimately connected with libraries through their research needs. Most groups have copies of the correct recording pages to give out or sell to researchers.
Once you have the pages in hand you will see that they are quite easy to follow. There are spaces for names, partners, dates, children, occupation, parents and usually space for brief info on the children such as who they marry and any children they might have. Keep your pages together in family groups.
You'll also come across a page that looks more like a family tree starting with one person and ending with slots for up to six people. Fill these out as well.
If you haven't quite figured it out yet, family history research uses lots of paper so you'll need somewhere to store it. Look around for a sturdy suspension file box or cabinet.
You will eventually hit a few snags in your information trail. What you can't get from your parents, grandparents and other relatives, you should be able to get from the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages. These registries issue, for a fee, copies of birth, death and marriage certificates registered with them. Registration of such events hasn't always been compulsory though so once you get back 100 years plus certificates are harder to find.
Record all the info on to your pages [computer or hardcopy] and store the certificate somewhere safe. Each certificate should [but not necessarily] provide you with parent names and occupations, and siblings or issue. As you reach further back in time you may find that some of the names are a little different to what you expected. This may be in spelling only or it may be a completely different name. The information recorded on the certificate depends on the knowledge of the original person providing it. Another common experience is that people have the habit of changing the name they are known by over their life time. For example, my grandmother's name was "Dorothy" but everyone called her "Billie". My great-grandfather's name was "William", yet his officially recorded name is "Willie".
If you are struggling with obtaining all the information on long-dead relatives then take a look at what you do have. Occupations, membership in groups, schools and knowing where they lived or were born, can all unearth more history. Try contacting local history groups and family history groups in the area where your ancestors lived. Research the groups they participated in. One of my greatx2-grandfathers was a member of the Oddfellows Society. The group did, and still does, provide health fund membership. Through research into that group in the local area I found details not only of my direct ancestor but also a number of his brothers, brothers-in-law and father, including when and how some of them died, who they were married to and when they had children.
Hopefully by this stage you have joined your local family history group where you will find plenty of people to help you, resources, and access to further lines of query. Your group may also run courses for beginners and will advertise other courses and workshops you can attend. To research your family history, you need time, patience and a curious mind. Talk to your family and record their stories, but don't take what they say as the whole truth. Investigate everything you can and back up the stories with facts. Truth, like names, changes over time.
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