Just Starting to trace your family tree?

The First steps in building your tree:
Birth, marriage and death certificates
Census records
Parish records
Trade directories

Just Starting? - Birth, marriage and death certificates

Where do you start? With yourself.
Work back from the present to the past using birth and marriage certificates

• Start with your birth certificate. It’ll give your parents’ names, including your mother’s maiden name. Other details shown include your place of birth, your parents’ address and father’s occupation (latterly mother’s too).
• Using your parents’ names (as found on your birth certificate), search in the marriage indexes sometime around/before your birth (or that of older siblings) to find their names and marriage date. Then, if necessary, you can order their marriage certificate.
• Using their names as found on their marriage certificate (corroborated by their fathers’ names also found on the marriage certificate), find your parents’ birth certificates.
• Using your grandparents’ names (from your parents’ birth certificates), find your grandparents’ marriage certificates.

Track your ancestors back – by birth certificate, then marriage certificate back to 1837 – the first year of civil registration of births, marriages and deaths in England and Wales. In Scotland civil registration started in 1855, and in Ireland in 1864.
Of course, this strategy only works when our ancestors obeyed the rules – getting married and then actually registering the births of their children ... but life is not always that simple!

Online
Search the birth, marriage and death indexes online. Sites to try include www.ancestry.co.uk, www.bmdindex.co.uk, www.findmypast.com, www.familyrelatives.com and www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk. You need to pay to view the digital images of the indexes online. The indexes for Ireland are not online, but find out more information at www.groireland.ie and Looking in.
Alternatively, try www.freebmd.org.uk This is a free website covering England and Wales, with over 133 million records. Not all the indexes are available yet, but it’s worth a try.

Just Starting? - Census Records

How can the census help?
Censuses occur every 10 years in the UK and can help you find out what your ancestors did in the decades in between being born, getting married and dying.

• The first official census of the UK was taken in 1801, but it didn’t include people’s names.
• The first census of broad use to family historians is the 1841 Census. It included all the adults and children in each house, providing you with their names, ages, occupations, the address, and whether born in the census county. From the 1851 Census the relationship to the head of household was included, as were more specific details about the place of birth.
• The census was not taken in 1941, as the Second World War was waging.
• To protect people’s privacy, the censuses are subject to a hundred-year closure period. This means that the most recent census available to family historians in England, Wales and Scotland is the 1901 Census. In Ireland the 1911 Census is available to help, as earlier censuses were damaged in 1922.
• It is important to note the date that each census was taken: your ancestor may have died before the census date that year, have been born after it, or have simply moved house.

Online
Search the census returns online. Sites to try include www.thegenealogist.co.uk, www.ancestry.co.uk, www.findmypast.com, www.familyrelatives.com, www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk, www.originsnetwork.com. You need to pay to view the digital images of the original census pages online. The indexes for Ireland are not online, but find out more information at www.groireland.ie and www.groni.gov.uk. Alternatively, for the 1881 Census of England and Wales only, try www.familysearch.org: you can see a full transcription online – free – but no original images.

Just Starting? - Parish/Church records

Looking in church records
The registers of baptisms, marriages and burials, as kept by parish churches for these events, are vital for marking the start and end of our ancestors’ lives, and the joining of family trees by marriage. Before the statutory registration of births, marriages and deaths, which started in England and Wales in 1837 (and in stages from 1845 in Ireland and from 1855 in Scotland) these parish registers are the source that will help you build your family tree: by finding the baptism of an ancestor, with the father’s name (and from later dates the mother’s too), you can start to branch backwards through the generations, looking for the entry of their marriage in the register before or around the date of the eldest baby’s baptism.
Parish registers continue to record baptisms, marriages and burials. Although the coverage varies significantly for parish registers through the centuries, the 1500s onwards are fairly well covered.
NB A ‘stray’ is an entry in a parish register about someone who does not come from that parish. The person might come from a different parish or county.
To see an example of a typed transcription of a parish register, view the Family Tree Magazine cover disc.

Online and on CD

• www.familyhistoryonline.net has a wide selection of pay-per-view parish register indexes, made by volunteers of various family history societies.
• www.familysearch.org has names, taken from baptisms, banns and marriages, available free online in the International Genealogical Index.
• National Burial Index: national indexes made from burial registers in England and Wales, including 13.2 million names, available on CD from www.genfair.com.
• Phillimore’s marriages: indexes for about 30 English counties (partial coverage).

Just Starting? - Trade directories

Looking in trade directories
North, south, east or west, from the later 1700s to the early 20th century you should be able to find a trade directory covering the period and area that your ancestors lived in.
Historical trade directories help us learn about:

• the local traders, whether one-man bands or key industries, and employers.
• the important members of society, such as landowners, of whom our ancestors may have been tenants.
• the history and geography of our ancestor’s home town/area.
• life between the censuses, as although the census is taken once a decade in Britain, trade directories are far more frequent.

Originally local traders wanted to advertise their specialist skills, and so the local trade directory was born. It was the rise of the telephone – and telephone directories – which saw the eventual demise of trade directories.
Tip: Trade directories can be a year or so out of date at the time of publication, due to the time it took to compile them. So if you don’t find an ancestor where you might expect to, bear this in mind.

Online and on CD
Browse and search the digitised trade directories online at www.historicaldirectories.org. They cover directories from England and Wales and are free to access at the moment, although the future of their accessibility is uncertain. Take a look at the cover disc on Practical Family History, which includes a digitised version of a county trade directory each month. An original trade directory can cost several hundred pounds. However, many companies have digitised these originals, and provide them on CD at very modest cost – from about £5.95. Try: www.my-history.co.uk, www.genealogysupplies.com, www.archivecdbooks.org.uk, www.midlandshistoricaldata.org.