Creating Your Family Tree
Contents
Beginning Your Research
Before you can start constructing your tree, you need to find the branches and twigs to populate it. This page will give you advice on how to go about it and where to find the information, together with hints and tips on deciding whether they are "yours", using The Wiki pages and external links.
Step One ~ Talk To Your Relatives
The first thing to do when you’re starting out is to write down everything you know about your family – names, dates and places of birth, marriages & deaths etc. Ask your relatives for help, especially the older generation, they’re usually a mine of information and stories. Perhaps take a tape recorder along with you to record what they say. Collect together as many old photos, certificates and other family documents you can find. Try to find out the identities of the people in these photos.
Once you’ve collected all of this information and drawn up a simple tree linking them all together, you’re now ready to trace your family back further.
- Downloadable Blank Charts Seven different layouts for recording your direct line.
- How to store it all... Gives many different ideas on how to organise your information.
Step Two ~ Going Back Before 1900
You may be lucky enough to have enough information to take you back to 1901 and beyond. The 1901 census is the latest one which is available to family researchers in its entirety. You can search the census from the comfort of your computer chair through subscription websites such as Ancestry and other sites which you can find on Online Research.
Once you have found your known relative, look to see who’s living in the same household – brothers, sisters, parents or even grandparents. Census returns including names, ages and places of birth were taken every 10 years from 1841, so online you have access to 60 years worth of census records. By tracing your family back through the census returns it is possible to take your family back to ancestors born in the 1700’s.
Family History Research ~ Step Two This page extends the search back to 1841.
Write down all of your new found information. It would also be a good idea to save the census images you have found to a file on your computer.
The Census Search pages will give you information about Census returns and advice for searching them.
A Visual Guide to Tracking down your ancestors before 1900.
Step Three ~ How Do You Know They "Belong" In Your Tree?
What you have now is the framework of your family tree. Some of this information may be wrong, perhaps Granny’s memory is failing, or that the information recorded on the census returns is incorrect.
To confirm these connections you will need to obtain your ancestor’s birth, marriage and death certificates. These can be obtained online from the General Record Office (GRO) (the General Register Office of Scotland (GROS) in Scotland) or through the local register office where the event was registered. It should cost you around £7 per certificate, which can work out quite expensive. However it is essential that you confirm connections this way, otherwise you can end up tracing the wrong ancestors.
If you weren’t able to trace your family back to the time of the 1901 census, then you can do this through certificates.
Birth, marriage & death certificates in England and Wales are available from 1stJuly 1837 (and from 1855 in Scotland) when civil registration was first introduced.
These pages will help you find out All About Certificates and how to go about obtaining them.
Finding Those Names
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Sorting Out Those Relationships ...
Who is your 5th cousin twice removed? Can first cousins marry? Can a man marry his wife's sister? Is a man allowed to marry his great-grandmother in Scotland?
Find the answers here: Degrees of Kinship
Quick Hints and Tips
- Once you find the census images it’s a good idea to download them to your computer and keep them in a file all together.
And When You Have Found All The Information
Your tree is growing now, perhaps now’s the time to think about getting Family Tree software program to record all of your new found information.
Your tree is looking good now, perhaps it’s time to revisit your relatives to jog some memories and hopefully get some more information and put some more names to faces in those old photos......
