Who Do You Think You Are? Encyclopedia of Genealogy (2 page)

The aim of this section is to encourage you to take those initial steps! Family history can be daunting and many people are put off because they simply don't know where to start. The chapters in this section will take you through the key preparatory stages, from talking to your family to building your family tree, setting your research goals (so that they are realistic!) and locating the best place to start your research.

Every journey starts with a single step, and in the case of tracking down your ancestors your first 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 …

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.

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.

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
.

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.

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

•
The names and vital details of your siblings

•
Your parents' names, dates of birth, marriage and death if applicable

•
The names and vital details of your aunts and uncles

•
Your grandparents' names, dates of birth, marriage and death if applicable

•
The names and vital details of your great-aunts and uncles (the siblings of your grandparents)

•
Anything you know about your great-grandparents, their siblings, and anyone who came before them

•
Family stories you have heard and who told them to you

Having written down as much information as you can about your forebears, it's time to cast the net a little wider and draw upon the collective wisdom of your living relatives. Holidays such as Easter or Christmas, when the family tends to congregate, are often good times to begin your research, because festive gatherings tend to generate a sense of nostalgia, when folk naturally start to reminisce about happy times from the past, swapping anecdotes about relatives who may no longer be around to enjoy the festivities. If you can't wait for a natural opportunity to arise, you can always organize a family reunion, making sure to invite as many
of the older generations as you can. You will probably find that others are just as interested in your research as you are and will be eager to help you – story-telling is as much fun for the narrator as the audience.

Although you may have heard the same stories told year after year, there are probably plenty more that you haven't heard, mainly because it's easy to play down moments in one's life that we think are uninteresting, but are actually fascinating to someone who wasn't there. An ‘everyday' childhood memory of growing up during the Blitz is still a powerful, unknown and chilling story to a later generation who have no concept of what it would have been like.

Aside from these colourful stories, it's important to focus – as before – on simple biographical details of names, dates and places. This is why it's important to talk to older members of the family; they can tell you about their parents and grandparents, folk that you are unlikely ever to have met other than in faded photographs. However, don't forget to record details of their lives as well – where they lived, what their jobs were and, most important of all, what they were like as people. It's all too easy to treat family history as an academic exercise, but these are the details you'll want to pass on to other members of the family. You'll be amazed at what you can uncover by spending several hours talking to a great-aunt – details of your grandparents as children, growing up in the countryside for instance, and working on a farm before moving to the city later in life. These conversations will peel back time and you'll see your family in an entirely new light – your grandparents as children; your uncles and aunts as brothers and sisters; and generations of your relatives at work and play, in love and in mourning.

Sadly, many people leave it too late to start this important process, or simply don't have any living relatives to help with this initial research. Whilst this makes things a bit harder, and removes the colour from the first stage of your research, it is still perfectly possible to start your family history from scratch, using the information on your birth certificate to find your parents' marriage and birth certificates and then work back from there. If this is the case, the information in
Chapter 5
will help you get started.

It may seem like the most natural thing in the world to sit down with your relatives and extract information, but in reality a great deal of planning ought to go into this process, not only to focus your attention on what you need to find out, but also to put your family at ease. After
all, you don't want them to think they're about to face the Spanish Inquisition! It can be rather unnerving for both interviewer and interviewee at first, so you need to go out of your way to make the process as simple and fun as possible. For example, if you've set up a family gathering, you could even have a bit of fun and turn it into a game – initially asking the same few questions to everyone and comparing the answers afterwards to see who remembers the most, stimulating discussion and allowing you to focus on the most likely source of further information.

However, if you are spending time visiting members of the family individually, make sure you've compiled a clear set of questions, topics and people that you want to ask them about. Who was Great-aunt Alice? When was she born? Who was her husband, and when did they marry? Where was the ceremony? Did they live in the same area? So, Great-uncle Herbert was a farmer? Where was the farm? It's also important to focus on one family member at a time, so that neither you nor your relative becomes confused. In general, you should concentrate on obtaining initial information about:

•
 
Names, including Christian and nicknames, surnames and maiden names

•
 
Dates of birth, marriage and death

•
 
Places of birth, marriage, death and abode

•
 
Occupations

Once you've obtained as much biographical data about a person as you can, it's then time to ask about what the people were like. Having found out that Great-aunt Alice was born in London, but ended up marrying a farmer called Herbert in a remote part of Norfolk, the burning question is how did they meet? How did she adapt to life on a farm, having been brought up a Londoner? What was she like as a person?

This is where you'll have to exercise your diplomatic skills, as people can ramble on a bit, and memory will play tricks if the events being described took place a long time ago. You will need to balance the desire to learn about a particular subject with the ability to let someone talk about their past without too much interruption, because we all love telling anecdotes. However, your relatives may not want to talk about everything that's happened to them. Attitudes to illegitimacy have changed over time, and what to us is an interesting story might be a stigma that's caused pain and misery for decades. If you sense that someone is uncomfortable talking about certain matters then do not
force them to continue. It is better that you leave that topic of conversation so your interviewee does not feel pressurized. They may even decide to come back to talk to you about it at another time when they feel more comfortable.