Find my family history
Everyone at some point in their lives wonders about their family origins and where their ancestors came from and what they did. Were they rich, famous, heros, villians or just normally people working hard to survive. Finding your family history and tracing your family tree has become much simpler in recent years thanks to many records being available online.
Where to start
The best place to start finding out about your family history is to write everything you know about your family down. This should include basic details about each family member including their name, date of birth, marriage date, death date, occupations and locations. Do not worry if you only have written down a few details as hopefully as you learn more and more about your family history you will soon know a lot more about where your ancestors came from, what they did and how this affects you.
After writing everything down the next step is to speak to all your living relatives to find out more information about them and also to see if they can provide you with more details of their ancestors. If possible try to obtain copies of any birth certificates, marriage certificates or death certificates as you can use the information contained on these to trace your family tree. Also try to get hold of any photographs as these will really start to bring your family's history to life.
Before you go off and spend a lot of time researching your family history it is probably worth searching online through sites such as Genesreunited and Ancestry to see if someone else has documented any parts of your family tree. These sites allow you to enter details of your family tree and then try to match parts of your family tree with other peoples. If there are any matches you can contact these people and hopefully to find out how they are related and if they can provide you with more details of your family. Even if there are no matches if you leave your details someone may contact you in the future if any of the branches in their family tree joins up with your own family tree.
If there are parts of your family tree that you have been unable to find out about then look at the oldest certificate (birth, marriage or death) that you have and look at the details on it to see how they can help you find your family history.
Certificate information
Birth certificates normally show the date, time and place of birth. They also show the name of the parents, their occupations, their age, their date of marriage and the name of the informant
Marriage certificates tend to show the date and place of the marriage ceremony as well as the name, address, age and occupations of the bride and groom. Other information normally disclosed are the names of the bride and grooms parents and their occupations. It will also provide details of the clergyman and the witnesses.
Death certificates will show the date, time and place of death. Other useful information normally shown is the deceased persons age, details of the parents names, occupations and ages if they are still alive. The cause of death, the name of the informant and details of the person who issued the death certificate are normally also provided.
If you look at the certificates that you have you should have some names of family members who you have no information about but by using the information that you have on the certificate you can find out much more about them.
As an example, if you have a birth certificate for a Russell Nash, it should also tell you the names of his parents, their date of marriage and their ages. Using this information you can search online at look for their marriage certificate. Russell's birth certificate shows he was born in Scotland so a search of Scotlandspeople would be the best place to start. Had he been born in England the General Register Office would have been a useful starting place. Another useful site covering the birth certificates across the whole world is FamilySearch.
Anyway back to Russell's parents. His birth certificate tells us his parent names and dates of birth so we can enter these details into the search criteria and look for certificates on which these two peoples set of names appear. If there is more than one certificate with similar names to his parents we can use their ages from Russell's birth certificate to narrow this down to identify his parents.
We can then take the information on his parents marriage certificate to look for their birth certificates or death certificates. We can also search online Census information from sites mentioned earlier such as Genesreunited, Ancestry, Scotlandspeople, General Register Office and FamilySearch to find out information about other family members such as brothers and sisters as they would have lived at the same address. We can then look for their certificates and gradually we can trace Russell's family back one generation at a time.
