START YOUR FAMILY TREE ONLINE
In the second part of our new series, Chris Paton picks the crucial websites to grow your tree
Last month I described how to start compiling your family tree by using birth, marriage and death records, as well as census information. From these documents it is possible to extract key genealogical facts about your recent ancestors and their families, as well as additional information about their occupations and where they lived. Now you have a foothold in your ancestral past, what should be the next step?
A key thing to note about your family history is that it is your family history – this is your project, and you are answerable only to yourself and to those to whom you may wish to pass on your findings. If your objective is to push back as far as you can, to identify as many ancestors as possible, then you can continue to do so. There are no shortcuts to this, however, and the fact that a relative has a family tree hosted online that claims that you are descended from William the Conqueror, Robert the Bruce, Niall of the Nine Hostages or Owain Glynd^wr is simply not enough, for it may very well be inaccurate.
Choose your approach
You need to start from what you know to be correct, and to confirm the identity of each prior generation’s members using original documentation, on all ancestral lines, the surname line, or whichever lines you choose to pursue. An alternative approach is to not worry so much about how far back you can go, but to discover as much as you can about particular individuals or families – ie to tell their stories and go beyond simple names, dates and places.
Most family historians will seek to employ both approaches, but how successful they are depends on whether there were ever records that might have named their ancestors; and if so, whether these have survived and are accessible. Most of this material will be held within archives and libraries across the UK and Ireland, but increasingly
such collections are being digitised, transcribed, indexed and published online. Many are free to access, while others will require a fee.
Before the advent of civil registration across the UK in the 19th century, the records that will identify most of our forebears are the baptismal, marriage and burial records of the parish churches across Britain and Ireland. It is important to note that for much of the historic period, there will have been a ‘state church’ in each country, as well as separate, Christianbased nonconformist or dissenting faiths, and records from other religions, such as Judaism. For England, Wales and Ireland, the state body was the Anglican church, which had special privileges and rights, even if it was not the main faith adhered to in an area – for example, in Ireland, the Anglicanbased Church of Ireland had a right to collect a tax called a ‘tithe’, even though the majority of the population was Roman Catholic. Similarly the Presbyterian-based Church of Scotland was a state body, with its own privileged standing. If you search a collection for a particular parish, and cannot find who you are looking for, it may be because they followed a different denomination to the one you have assumed.
There are many websites to search for English and Welsh parish records, but the free-to-access FamilySearch is a useful starting-point: familysearch.
org. This is the online platform for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints, whose members have a theological requirement to research and commemorate their ancestors, and which has kindly allowed nonmembers access, free of charge. Here you will find many searchable parish register collections for the two countries (including copies of parish registers known as Bishops’ Transcripts), with some presented as simple indexes, and others accompanied by digital images from the register books. If nothing can be found, additional records may be located on subscription-based platforms such as Ancestry ( ancestry. co.uk), Findmypast ( findmypast. co.uk) and TheGenealogist ( thegenealogist.co.uk).
Scottish resources
For Scotland, the ScotlandsPeople website ( scotlandspeople.gov.uk) is the main online repository for copies of original records, although Scottish Indexes ( scottishindexes.com) and Old Scottish ( oldscottish.com) are increasingly worth consulting. In Ireland, Roman Catholic records prior to 1880 are digitised and freely available at registers.nli.ie, with free indexes to these hosted on both Findmypast (search for ‘Ireland Roman Catholic’ at search.findmy past.co.uk/historical-records) and Ancestry ( search.ancestry.co.uk/ search/db.aspx?dbid=61039). Material from other churches can be sourced from sites such as ireland. anglican.org/about/rcb-library/ anglican-record-project, irish genealogy.ie and rootsireland.ie. The wills that people created can also be very useful, if you are lucky enough to have an ancestor who left one. Those ‘confirmed’ (proved) by the courts in Scotland prior to 1925 are all available on ScotlandsPeople, but for England and Wales it is a little more complicated. Wills from
Wills can be very useful, if you are lucky enough to have an ancestor who left one
1858 onwards, as dealt with by the civil courts, can be sourced at
probatesearch.service.gov.uk. Earlier records could have been generated by a number of different Anglican church courts, but a useful starting point is the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, as available on the website of The National Archives (TNA) at Kew: nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-withyour-research/research-guides/ wills-1384-1858 (or through Ancestry and TheGenealogist). For Ireland, some historic wills prior to 1922 were destroyed in the Irish Civil War, but for surviving Northern Ireland wills after 1858 visit the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) website at nidirect.gov.uk/proni, and for the whole of Ireland see also genealogy. nationalarchives.ie.
The records described so far will provide some basic biographical information about individuals, but a useful resource that can help you to add more flesh to their bones is a contemporary newspaper. The British Newspaper Archive ( british
newspaperarchive.co.uk) is a project between Findmypast and the British Library to digitise some 40 million pages of newspaper content. Searches using the names of your ancestors, or the streets or villages they lived within, can often yield stories directly about them, and reveal a little about the place at the time when they were alive. Access to the collection is also included in a ‘Pro’ subscription to Findmypast.
One of the advantages of subscribing to sites such as Ancestry, Findmypast and TheGenealogist is that they also host a variety of records concerning occupations, such as nursing and teaching. In particular, you can also find military service records for those who served in the First World War and earlier, including for Army personnel, seamen and air personnel. Most of the records are sourced from TNA, which also has many further collections available. The websites for the other national archives within the UK have research guides concerning many occupations. For Scotland, visit the National Records of Scotland website at nrscotland.gov.
uk, while for Northern Ireland again visit PRONI’s website.
Finally, there are many geographical resources to reveal more about the environment your ancestors lived in. Mapping and directory resources such as A Vision of Britain Through Time ( visionofbritain.org.uk), the University of Leicester’s county directories ( bit.ly/leic-directories), the National Library of Scotland’s
directories and maps ( digital.nls.uk/
gallery/category/family-history) and PRONI’s maps and street directories ( bit.ly/proni-archives) can provide some much-needed context. Gazetteers and parish histories can also help. The Victoria County History series ( victoriacountyhistory.ac.uk) offers a concise historical description of many counties in England and Wales, while the Statistical Accounts of Scotland ( stataccscot.edina.ac.uk) has detailed descriptions of each parish in the 1790s and 1830s–1840s.
Subscription sites host a variety of records concerning occupations