YOUR FREE PASSPORT FOR TIME TRAVEL
Genealogist Andrew Chapman sets you off on a unique journey thanks to your free subscription to TheGenealogist (worth £24.95)
Tracing your family history has never been easier. With this magazine, you have received an exclusive invitation to sign up for a free three-month Gold subscription to TheGenealogist, the best site for getting started with researching your family roots. Your Gold subscription contains a wealth of resources and tools for pushing back through the centuries of your personal heritage.
SETTING OFF ON YOUR VOYAGE
The golden rule of genealogy is to work backwards. You’ll need a few pieces of information – ideally a date and a place for someone whose roots you’d like to explore. Any family documents you may have found, such as letters, photographs, wills or newspaper cuttings, will also come in useful. You will always need to corroborate what you find with actual records.
BIRTHS MARRIAGE SAND DEATHS
Birth, marriage and death indexes contain information will allow you to buy copies of the original certificates from the General Register Office. The actual certificates then open up a lot more information: date of birth, names and address of parents for a birth; addresses of the spouses and names of fathers from marriage certificates; and place of death, age and informant’s details from deaths.
TEN-YEAR LEAPS
The census records available online span every ten years from 1841 to 1911 inclusive. If you find your ancestor as a child, you’ll then have details of their parents and siblings. Their address is useful, too, as you may find your forebears stayed put from one decade to the next – and in fact TheGenealogist’s brilliant Master Search feature even allows you to search these records by address and keywords such as occupation.
FINDING MORE DETAIL
Residential and trade directories, some as early as the 1770s, typically tell you about the communities where your family lived. You’ll also find land ownership records from the 1870s covering Britain and Ireland, as well as extensive Rolls of Honour for WWI, for example, as well as army lists from the late 17th century up to 1940, and various navy lists from 1822 to 1944.
PUSHING BACK THROUGH TIME
The 500-year old parish record system gives you access to collections of transcribed baptism, marriage and burial records for more than 30 English counties and some parts of Wales, as well as a major collection of Nonconformist registers covering Methodists, Baptists, Catholics, Quakers and other denominations. You will also have access to the vast collection of wills proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury (PCC) – these span from 1384 to 1858 – as well as other collections of wills from around 20 counties, dating from the 16th to 18th centuries.
MASTER THE PAST
It’s particularly easy to make connections between different types of records with your Gold subscription, thanks to TheGenealogist’s powerful and easy-to-use Master Search feature – just enter whatever information you have and it will provide instant results which you can then filter. Often, even just a name and a location can be enough to set you off on your time-travelling trip. Bon voyage!