I began researching my family history when I was asked, as a History lecturer, to teach a course on family history at a college. My previous experiences of family history had simply been fighting with geneaologists for control of the microfilm machines in libraries and archives, but I did not think I could teach something without having had a go. My early discoveries were so intriguing that researching my family history has become a real passion. Why not have a go yourself?
Family History Research: Start With What You Know
Successful family history research always works backwards, so the first step should always be starting with what you know. Knowing the rules and common formats for family trees helps here. So I began with my own immediate family:
Brian Hall (b. 1944, Leeds) = Virginia Gulley (b. 1947, Karachi)
(These are my parents, the "=" sign denotes that they are married. A line heads downwards from that symbol and branches out to show me and my brother:
Nicholas Hall (b 1973, Shipley)
Duncan Hall (b. 1975, Bradford)
I was also able to add exact dates of birth for these, and a marriage date for my parents. Using the same format I was able to include both sets of grandparents and also my parents' siblings, and their children (my cousins). I knew my grandparents' names, but not their exact years of birth, nor places of birth. Here came the next important lesson:
Find Family Documents, Talk to Living Relatives
Some important gaps could be filled in almost immediately, when I talked to my parents about what they knew. They knew years and dates of birth for their parents and had a good idea of places of birth (that would have to be confirmed or denied at a later date). They were also able to fill in those gaps that do not appear in a family tree but make the whole thing worthwhile: what they did, where they lived, what their lives were like, etc.
Another set of very important sources for me were documents that my grandmother had kept. The first and most important was a birthday book. This confirmed her own date and year of birth but also many other family members.
To begin with some of these names were mysterious. However, as a tree built up, names written in my grandmother's birthday book (that had previously belonged to her mother) turned into great and great-great aunts and uncles and distant cousins.
Photograph albums were also of immense value: putting faces to names (and names to faces) made me feel like I was making real progress. Some documents also provided false leads. My grandmother had three separate documents about a well-to-do family, the Woodds (including a delightful hand-written letter from the early 19th century that read like something a Jane Austen heroine might have written).
However, after much fruitless digging, any link between the Woodd family and my own remains elusive, and my grandmother's reasons for keeping these documents (two letters and a newspaper obituary) remain a mystery.
Another important step is talking to living relatives: the older the better. Showing elderly relatives old photographs and getting them to put names to faces is of enormous value. I got a lot of detail from great aunts, but also got a lot of questions and problems to focus on. Family stories emerged that I needed to confirm or deny. My great aunt also provided a great deal more family documents, including birth certificates and letters (one dealing with the brutal murder of a relative by a British officer on a train on India's North-West frontier).
Family History Records Online
It is important to do this preparatory work before heading onto the many excellent websites that contain family history documents. I quickly tried to find family on online census and birth, marriage and death (BMD) records and initially found very little. If, like me, you begin with parents and grandparents, it is very likely that you will fail to reach individuals who may be found on public databases.
When I was researching the most recent searchable census was 1901. It is 1911 now, but even so, it is great grandparents or even great-great grandparents whose presence you might find there. The more you know the better.
Transcripts are not perfect. At one stage I thought one of my families (the Storeys) must have emigrated, only to find them after all, transcribed as the Storys. Had I not known the names of multiple family members and a few places and dates of birth, I would not have been able to confirm I had rediscovered the same family. The records are full of Thomases, Williams and Marys.
There are many sites to choose from, but I found Ancestry.co.uk very useful (primarily when I started because they hosted the various UK census records, though I later also found them useful for ship passenger lists and military records). Find My Past was also of great value. A website that helped a great deal more than might be expected was Genes Reunited. Not only does this site include useful software to allow you to build your family tree, it also puts you in touch with other people who may be researching the same families you are.
Through Genes Reunited I have been in contact with a number of very distant relatives. One got back in touch with me only this week with an exciting discovery. One of my family lines, based in India, had been traced back to around the mid 19th century but there the trail had run cold.
An elderly relative had given me the family legend: John Thaddeus' father, also called John Thaddeus, was a Greek doctor from Cephalonica. In fact, this week, we discovered his father was Bartholomew Thaddeus, also born in India, and his father was Chatadoor Thaddeus, which sounds rather as if I have a direct ancestor who is actually Indian (rather than British, Irish or Greek in India). Such discoveries make the whole process worth it!
Keep Good Records
My final important advice is to keep good records. My initial approach was simply to keep drawing a tree on a huge sheet of card (and later, copy it onto Genes Reunited and continue it there). However, I did not realise at this time that these records would be ones I would return to sporadically year after year. Coming back to them I no longer had any idea where information had come from. I had carefully put marks like (b. c1880) when I was unsure of an exact year of birth, but other than that I was unclear when information was from records or from oral sources. Learn from my lesson: take meticulous notes!
It really is worthwhile doing this. Every family history story is different (as illustrated so wonderfully on the BBC Who Do You Think You Are series) and every family history story has a few surprises in store.
Duncan Hall - Duncan Hall is a semi-professional acoustic musician and lecturer in Government & Politics
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