TRACE YOUR FAMILY HISTORY FOR FREE
FIND OUT HOW TO MAKE THE MOST OF YOUR FREE THREE-MONTH SUBSCRIPTION TO THEGENEALOGIST
E very reader is invited to sign up for a free threemonth Gold subscription to TheGenealogist, where millions of birth, marriage and death records from England and Wales are accessible, as well as other records from Scotland and overseas, including census returns, parish registers, wills, military records, landowner returns, an image archive and many other valuable resources.
The website has everything you need to start building your family tree from scratch, and for seasoned researchers, TheGenealogist’s unique, powerful tools help to bust those brick walls, using the Master Search and SmartSearch to home in on elusive forebears. First Steps With the General Register Office indexes to births, marriages and deaths available on TheGenealogist from 1837–2005, you can build your family tree working back through time. The certificates need to be ordered from gro.gov.uk, and give both parents’ names on birth certificates, including the mother’s maiden name, father’s names on marriage certificates and often next-of-kin on death certificates. They also describe your ancestors’ occupations and tell you where they lived. These records form the basic building blocks, alongside census returns taken every 10 years from 1841 and available up to 1911. Finding Elusive Ancestors You can search the census in a variety of ways on TheGenealogist, selecting to either look for a person, a family group or an address on the Master Search. This wide range of options can identify elusive ancestors and those with common surnames. The person search has a keyword box for any words that you would expect to see, like occupation, place of birth or address.
Ancestors’ names don’t always appear in the records as we might expect. As well as using wildcards and playing around with the phonetic and standard surname filters to look for variant spellings, you can leave the name boxes blank, entering just a keyword, year of birth and selecting a county – particularly useful for identifying name variations. Going Further The Gold subscription includes a major collection of wills proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury from 1384 to 1858, as well as calendars to probate records from lesser ecclesiastical courts. Wills usually mention many close relations, and it’s not uncommon to discover family feuds resulting in people being disinherited.
Parish records take us back beyond 1837 when civil registration began, but if your relatives don’t appear in the Anglican church registers, perhaps they belonged to a Non-Conformist congregation. Registers of ceremonies performed by Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Baptist, Quaker, Methodist, Unitarian and other dissenting ministers can be searched right back to the mid-1600s on TheGenealogist. Alongside these, you have access to electoral records, directories, school and college registers and a wealth of military collections.