A guide to the records

The documents that we use to research our family histories can only tell us so much about our ancestors’ lives. They provide us with the basic facts – the whos, the wheres and the whens – but if we want to gain a greater understanding of them as individuals, we need to spread the net a bit wider. We need to find answers to the hows and the whys.

Put their lives in context

When we focus on a particular family, it’s all-too easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. Whether our ancestors lived in a remote settlement in rural Wales, a small market town in the south of England or a rapidly expanding mill town in the industrial northwest, they were part of a community. Their friends, neighbours and workmates, as well as their more distant relatives, formed what we might today call their ‘social network’; these are the people we find living next door to them in the census returns, acting as witnesses at their weddings and signing their names at foot of their wills.

To my mind, there’s nothing better than a good map to help us set our ancestors’ lives in the context of their local communities. And whether their lives were rural or urban, the same social networks were in place.

Plotting places on a map

Birth, marriage and death certificates, census returns, parish registers and all the other traditional family history sources, are so full of useful genealogical data that we can sometimes overlook the details they provide about our ancestors’ homes. And even if we do pay attention to their addresses, it’s not