How to get started?

Before you do anything else, write yourself out a family tree from the things you know already. Put in your siblings, mother and father, grandparents and aunts and uncles. Add as many facts as you can - dates of birth, locations.

Then talk to the older members of your family. If you have any really ancient members of the family, like grandparents and great aunts and uncles, grab them and make them tell you anything they know about the family. Ask if they have any family papers of certificates that might help you. Be aware that any correspondence that is dated, no matter how obscure, may help you to pin down the location of your ancestors and therefore distinguish them from the others.

Even if older members can't remember dates of birth, they may be able to give you a rough idea of when things happened, for you to confirm later.

Nowadays, I would advise you to start a book and add a page for each new person you find out about. Then note on the page the significant information about that person, and where you learned it from. I put the page for the person on the left, and a page for their immediate family on the right, which helps to keep notes and information about a family together, even when the other members of the family are not your direct ancestors. Sometimes these others can be the key to find information that is about your direct ancestor.

Once you have gone as far back as possible with your own resources, you need to work backwards using the Births, Marriages and Deaths indexes, either in person at one of the centres around the country, or online. I now use ancestry.co.uk because they give one free access to the births marriages and deaths indexes. These allow you to search for your ancestor, but the only way to tell if it is the right ancestor, and to gain more information, is to order a copy of the certificate for that person.

You can get different information from the indexes depending upon the age of the record, and different information from the actual copy of the certificate, depending upon what sort of certificate it is.


You can also get information from parish records, from histories of the location, especially if your ancestors stayed in the same place for a long time.