52 ancestors in 52 weeks

I have been a little bit lazy about my blog over the last few weeks – I blame Christmas – but I thought to give myself some impetus to blog more regularly I would attempt to meet the challenge set by Amy Johnson Crow to write something every week based on her themes set in 52 Ancestors in 52 weeks.

Week 1’s theme is Beginnings.

I previously wrote in my opening blog ‘How Did This All Begin?’ about my reasons for starting to research my family history so I thought I would talk about how I would advise someone else to get started. 

A question I have been asked by friends and colleagues regarding researching family history is where do I start? The advice I was given early on was to start with yourself. Write down everything you know about yourself, your parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, siblings etc. The first thing I did was to try and flesh out a basic family tree of my immediate family and build from there.

The second thing to do is ask! Talk to family members and try and fill in the blanks. Unfortunately my grandparents were no longer with us when I started my research but my parents helped me with what they knew. Note everything down, especially the family stories and rumours. Many of these may not turn out to be totally true but you can gather snippets of information that will form the foundations of your research.

I was lucky that on my mother’s side, my grandfather had already done quite a bit of research and had in fact employed a genealogist to draw up a family history which I could then check out and expand on.

The most important thing to remember is do not just take everything as fact. You must verify as much as you can with robust and original sources. Gather together birth, marriage and death certificates and other documents that help to prove and verify the information you have. The worst mistake you can make is to jump straight in without proper verification.

The internet has provided a massive leap in researching family history and there is so much information out there but be warned not all of it is true!! You may find what you think is a complete family history but you need to check all the sources and prove that it is what you think, or hope, it is. Many a family historian has been led down the wrong path by dubious information online.

Family history can be an expensive hobby. Ordering certificates and other documents means costs can soon mount up. There is so much free information out there and remember a very small percentage of what is out there is actually online. Use your local library and archives, most will have a lot of the original information that you can’t get anywhere else.

Paperwork soon mounts up when you start writing things down and gathering documents together so you need some sort of filing system. You will probably collect a number of photographs as well which will need identifying and cataloguing.

You may wish to invest in a subscription to one of the commercial family history websites such as Ancestry or Find My Past (other commercial sites are available) but this can be expensive so you need to consider carefully which site, if any, is most appropriate to your research. Multiple articles and blogs have been written about these sites but you need to consider which one might hold records for the area you are researching as each site holds different records. Also remember the Church of the Latter Day Saints Family Search website is free to use and holds millions of records from all over the world.

The most important thing to remember that, unlike the TV adverts, it is not just a case of typing in a name to a website or search engine and all the relevant records will fall into your lap. I have been researching for about 20 years and have only really scratched the surface.

Family history is a great and rewarding hobby and allows you to put your family into context with the world as it was around them and find their place in history. All I can say is Good Luck and happy searching.