Start your family history for FREE!
Thegenealogist is offering Computeractive readers a free threemonth subscription to the First Steps Plus package (worth £29.95)
Thegenealogist is offering
Computeractive readers a three-month First Steps Plus subscription completely free (the normal price is £29.95).
When researching your family tree, the best way to start is to talk to your relatives to get as much information from them as possible. You could ask if they mind you recording their answers on a phone, Skype or Zoom call. If you can’t record your conversations, it’s important to take notes so you can sketch out a basic family tree, combining your own knowledge with the information they have provided. Then you’re ready to start filling in the gaps by working your way back through your tree.
A subscription with Thegenealogist includes the tree-building software Treeview ( www.thegenealogist.co.uk/ researchguide/treeview) for adding people, notes, images and more. It also links automatically to all the records available in your subscription.
Find births, marriages and deaths
First Steps Plus offers the core resources essential to any family historian. Key records include the 1841, 1851, 1861, 1871, 1881, 1891, 1901 and 1911 censuses for England and Wales, and civil registration indexes of births, marriages and deaths (BMD) 1837-2005.
Using the information gleaned from your relatives, you can search for births, marriages and deaths in our indexes and order certificates from the General Register Office (GRO) website ( www.gro. gov.uk/gro/content/certificates/login. asp). A birth certificate will give you the person’s date and place of birth, their father’s name and occupation, and their mother’s maiden name.
A marriage certificate will provide the date and place of the marriage, the forenames and surnames of the couple and their ages (before 1855 it will show only ‘full’ if over 21 or ‘minor’ if under). It also lists the residence and profession of the father plus the names of the marriage witnesses.
Before you can order a certificate from the GRO, you’ll need a few important details, and that’s where the indexes from Thegenealogist’s First Steps Plus subscription will help. As an example, we consulted the indexes to find the particulars we needed to order a certificate for the birth of Sir Winston Churchill.
Churchill was born in 1874 at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, his family’s ancestral home. As you can see in the record (pictured left), the birth was registered in the district of Woodstock, Oxfordshire in the fourth quarter of 1874 in Volume 3a; Page 695.
Search the census results
You can then use these facts to search the censuses. When you search for known family members, you often find the whole family listed with their ages (using our Family button). You can then use this information to search for further births and marriages, working your way back through the generations. You can also work forwards along new branches of the tree to find any living relatives.
The Master Search lets you explore the English & Welsh Census Records to find out where ancestors were living in 1891, 1901 and 1911, complete with original images from The National Archives. You can search the census on Thegenealogist in a variety of ways – either by looking for a person, a family group or an address.
This choice of options makes it easier to identify ancestors who are otherwise
hard to find – perhaps because they have a common surname. A keyword box in the person search also lets you include any words you’d expect to see in the record, such as an occupation, place of birth or address.
As an example, we looked up Herbert Asquith, who was Prime Minister in 1911. When selecting Search for a person and entering the names into the search box, we also added Prime Minister as a keyword. Thegenealogist’s records returned a household of which Mr Asquith is the head. Not surprisingly, considering his occupation at the time, the address was 10 Downing Street, Whitehall, Westminster (see screenshot below left).
The address search is useful in cases where you know where an ancestor lived but can’t find them in other ways. People sometimes change the spelling of their surname or even adopt a different last name to inherit from another branch of their family.
The next example shows how an address search can help in cases where you can’t use a surname. Looking for Buckingham Palace in the records, for example, we found a number of households in Buckingham Palace Road, London, but also one for the palace itself, whose head of the household is HM King George (see screenshot above).
As the King and a member of the monarchy, he has no surname. This would make it difficult to find him in a search using just his first name, George. By using his address, however, we can see exactly who was present at the palace on census night, which in a Royal residence includes staff and servants.
We can then use the ‘View Family’ icon on the transcript page to select results just for the family. Refining the results in this way narrows them down to the King, the Queen and Princes Edward, Albert and John, who were all present at the address on census night - 2 April, 1911.
Ancestors’ names aren’t always spelled the way we would expect in the records. 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 and year of birth, and selecting a county. This is a particularly useful way to identify name variations.
Search the Image Archive
Your First Steps package also includes access to the Image Archive, so you can find images of towns, places, churches and more that your ancestors may have known. For example, we found the local Woodstock church (pictured left), near Blenheim Palace, in whose Parish Registers the baptism of Winston Churchill is recorded (although it actually took place in the country house itself).
Thegenealogist’s First Steps Plus package provides invaluable help when beginning your journey on the road to discovering your ancestors. You can also choose from a range of options that take you much further, taking advantage of our special offers. Whatever you choose to do, we’re sure you’ll find researching your family a rewarding experience.