The History of Our Family [antikvár]

How to Tracelbur Family - an Easy Guide You can start finding out about your family by questioning your relatives, especially grandparents and elderly aunts and uncles. One of them may have an old photograph album and it is a useful exercise to go through it, penciUlng in the names of as many people as possible. Another useful starting-point is an old family bible, especially one dating from the 19th century when it was the custom to write details of births, marriages etc on the fly leaf. Having obtained as much information as possible from the family, the next place to go in your search is the General Register Office (St Catherine's House, Kingsway, London WC2B 6JP) which holds records of aU births, marriages and deaths in England and Wales since 1 July 1837. There is no charge for searching the indexes, and if your name is an unusual one you could make a general search for aU the entries to be found under your surname. Here (if you do not already have one) you can apply for a copy of your own birth certificate and then, working backwards from the information supplied on the certificates, look for your parents' marriage certificate, their birth certificates, the marriage certificates of both sets of grandparents, birth certificates of these grandparents, marriage certificates of great-grandparents and so on. When an entry has been found in the index, a full certificate wHl be supphed for a fee of L4.60 if you do the search yourself, or L9.60 if ordered through the post. If you were bom in Scotland you wlU have to consult the Scottish Record Office (PO Box 36, HM General Register House, Edinburgh EHl 3YY). For records of births, marriages and deaths before 1837 you have to consult local parish registers - parish registers of baptisms, marriages and burials were first ordered to be kept in September 1538. To trace any ancestors bom before 1837, therefore, you first have to know which parish they were bom in. For this, your next Une of search is the census returns. A census has been taken every 10 years since 1801 and the returns for 1841, 1851 and 1861 are housed in the Pubhc Record Office (Land Registry Building, Portugal Street, London WC2A ILR) where they are open to public inspection. Having found from the earliest traceable birth or marriage certificate where your ancestors were living at the time, you can then find them in the census retum. Part of the Information given on census returns is where each person was bom, and from this you can discover where various members of the family were bom before 1837, indicating which parish registers should next be checked. Not aU parish registers have survived of course - only about one in 15 exist from 1538 and many do not begin until late in the 1600s. Over the years too, registers have been lost or mislaid. Most of those remaining are still held by the clergy, who are legally entitled to a fee for allowing you to search through them, though sometimes they win have been deposited for safekeeping in the County or Diocesan Record Offices. Consulting a parish register can be slow work. Before 1754 the entries for baptisms, marriages and burials were all in one volume, so you will have a lot of material to wade through. There again, people tended to have much larger families. In some city parishes, especially London, it can take hours to search through the entries even for a couple of years. Looking through parish registers can be even more time-consuming if members of your family tended to move around the country a lot, perhaps In search of work. But there are some short cuts. Many parish registers have now been copied or printed and so it may not be necessary to