Who Do You Think You Are? Encyclopedia of Genealogy: The definitive reference guide to tracing your family history. Nick Barratt

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СКАЧАТЬ step should be little more than a small pace. Your key resource is the knowledge contained within your family – biographical data, anecdotes and stories, personal documentation, and treasured family heirlooms, objects and artefacts. All of these can be used to build up a picture of your family in terms of acquiring facts such as ‘who is related to whom’, as well as an idea of what your relatives were like.

      There are a couple of questions you need to ask yourself before you get stuck in, as the answers will determine the direction your research will take. So …

      Why Do You Want to Start Your Research?

      If you’ve ever watched an episode of Who Do You Think You Are? you’ll notice that the initial focus of attention is the celebrity researcher themselves – what they know, what they want to find out, and how they feel about their family. This process of self-reflection is exactly what you need do in real life, in the sense that it is your quest, and therefore you need to set your own research goals. You should take some time to reflect on why you want to find out about your family’s heritage.

       ‘The first step is to gather as much information as you can about your family, from your family.’

      Everybody has a different reason. It may be to find out the truth about a long-standing family myth, such as the story passed down to Sue Johnston that her grandfather once drove the Flying Scotsman, or perhaps to find out more about yourself and why you have certain character traits, which was the original motivation for Bill Oddie’s investigation into the background of his mother – to find out why he felt abandoned by her at a young age, and understand the circumstances of her prolonged absences from the family home. Maybe your reason is to preserve the memory of the people who have shaped your destiny, in the way that Natasha Kaplinsky uncovered the truth behind what happened to her relatives who were killed in the Holocaust; or you may simply want to find out about your family out of personal interest, so that you have some stories to tell your children or grandchildren about their ancestors.

      How Do You Want to Approach Your Research?

      Your reason for starting out will largely determine what your initial research aims are. Although there are no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ ways of tackling research, there are several common ways to start out. Do you want to trace back as many generations as you can as quickly as possible, or would you rather look at each generation in detail and work back gradually? Some people prefer to concentrate on one side of their tree first, either their mother’s or father’s branch, and then begin the other side once they feel they have found all they can about the first branch.

      You may find it easier to build a skeleton tree as far back as you can to start with, because this does not need to take very long now that the Internet has brought genealogy into our living rooms, and then concentrate on putting some more flesh on the bones of the characters you found most interesting from your preliminary research by digging around in the archives. Even if your goal is to discover as much as possible about one particular ancestor, it can be helpful to investigate who came before and after them, as these are the people who would have influenced that ancestor’s life and been a part of their world.

      Reality Bites …

      Who Do You Think You Are? at times can make family history appear to be quite easy – but in reality, it can be anything but! Months of research underpin each programme, and many of the actual steps taken to arrive at a pivotal moment in the storyline aren’t filmed or shown, simply because there isn’t enough time to squeeze them into the programme.

      However, one thing that is reflected accurately on screen is the all too real sense of disappointment when a promising line of enquiry comes to an end. You have to be realistic with your initial aims; some families are going to be harder to trace than others, particularly the further back in time you progress. Similarly, if you have a very common surname in your tree, such as Jones or Smith, you will encounter difficulties tracing ancestors along that branch due to the sheer number of people who will share their name.

      Equally, if you know very little about your family to start with, it will take that little bit longer to get the ball rolling and you will probably have to purchase more certificates until you can work your way back to the nineteenth century, where the availability of another important set of documents, the census records, helps to speed up the process. Both of these key sources are explained in more detail in Section Two.

      It’s important not to be disheartened when you encounter setbacks such as these. You simply have to keep persevering, and you will find that the reward when you do discover that missing link is worth all the additional work. Genealogy is a detective process, and just like any investigation there will be times when you hit a brick wall and can seemingly go no further. There are tips about how to seek help to overcome these obstacles in Chapter 4.

      Starting Out

      The first practical step you’ll need to take is to gather as much information as you can about your family, from your family; and where better place to begin than with yourself? After all, it’s your journey. Write down everything you know about your immediate family, from your date of birth to your parents’ names, dates of birth and marriage, and see how far back you can go from there. Can you name all of your grandparents? Do you know their dates of birth, marriage and death if applicable? What about your eight great-grandparents? Can you name them, and provide similar details? It’s not as easy as it seems, and many people simply can’t give all of this data from memory. Nevertheless, even if you have doubts about what you think you know, it’s important to write down as much as you can remember about everyone at this stage.

      Apart from this important biographical data which, as you’ll see in Section Two, you will eventually use to start tracking down original documents, you also need to focus on other aspects of their lives. In particular, you need to focus on where they were born, married, lived and died, as geography plays an important part in the detective process. Indeed, make a note of any scrap of information that you can find out about them, such as what jobs they did, whether they moved around and when they lived in certain places. It helps to write down the names and age differences of any siblings you know of as well, as these may enable you to narrow down a search in the archives later on.

      Are there any family stories that were passed down to you that you want to find out more about? These will provide the colour in your family tree, and even trivial details can prove to be important in the next phase of your research, when you ask members of your family to comment on your memories. Did Uncle Albert serve with the Merchant Navy? What about great-grandpa, whose tales of valour in the Great War were retold regularly at Christmas? Memories of growing up in a foreign land, such as colonial India, can help you locate missing branches of your family when the time comes to search official records. Write down what you can remember about these snippets of information, and who told them to you. Research into these stories and family myths can run in parallel with your work constructing your family tree. You may find that as you build the basic tree the truth about some of these stories emerges, or it may become clear that more complicated research will be required to piece the jigsaw together, in which case Section Three of this book will be able to aid you.

      SUMMARY

       Recap of what to write down when making your initial notes:

      • Your full name, dates of birth and marriage, names and dates of birth and marriage of your children and grandchildren

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