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Build Your Family Tree. Preserve Your Heritage. An Introduction For anyone wishing to get started with their own family tree, the World Wide Web now contains a large number of databases containing public information, such as census records spanning centuries. The Internet has made both the locating and filtering of these records less complicated and has added an ease that has not been evident before. By simply typing in a select number of genealogical related keywords into your desired search engine you are instantly met with a huge network of resources. It is important to note that not all of these links are free, as many will offer a taste of their capability before requiring a fee to continue. Although this may appear a daunting task at first, once you become better acquainted with the technology and methods involved you can progress to the more advanced stages of researching your heritage. Getting Started Although the temptation is to immediately investigate the origins of your surname, there are many benefits to be had by taking a more considered approach to the research. By glossing over the major genealogy websites, such as www.ancestry.co.uk or www.familysearch.org, you immediately get a feel of the key words, phrases and concepts that heritage study provides. For instance, there is much gain to be had from familiarising yourself with terms such as ‘primary source’ (an original document or record) and ‘secondary source’ (an index or transcription). A list of useful glossary terms can be found at http://genealogypro.com/details/glossary.html. A quick Internet search of terms like these highlights the sheer amount of resources available to you and the best way to logically work through this information is through a family tree. A family tree will not only give you a clear structure to guide you through the process, but also some idea of the surnames and areas to primarily focus on. A key tip to getting started is to ensure that you concentrate and verify the vertical
lineage of your family. Going off to the side can help find information but it can
also lead to hours of wasted time building up a family tree that has massive width,
but little depth. This is not to say that it is unimportant to open up other avenues
of research when researching, for instance, your grandfather as often information regarding
his brothers and cousins etc can be just as useful. By always bringing your research
back to the vertical lineage of your family you make certain that information retrieved
remains as relevant as possible. |
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Recording Information Although it may not seem essential at first to keep evidence of the resources and information you have gathered, it will become essential later on in the process that all consulted documents are recorded. This will undoubtedly save you precious time and effort as you will not waste hours browsing through previous articles. This organisation will also provide the advantage of documented leads that you can follow when you come back to visit them. By employing a resource to store a family tree all research you have made can be stored in the same place and accessed almost instantly at any time. This type of back up to your investigation means that it is simple to add annotations and notes to your research and that there is added assistance to help pick up where you left off. Contacting others The resource of the Internet also reduces the stresses associated with attempting to contact long lost relatives from across the world. Many of the websites available that cover genealogy offer a type of community forum, where members can write to each other asking for advice or information regarding their loved ones. You can specify the surname you are seeking or the area you believe your ancestor was based in order to narrow and quicken this process. One of the most respected of these sites is www.genesreunited.co.uk, which offers a free sign up and instant searching of your family history. Getting the facts right The sheer volume of data that can be produced while researching your family tree leaves a great possibility of unreliable source material coming into contact with your findings. If available, always try to verify the facts you have found with more than one primary source document. This will hopefully restrict false information being collected and dead ends being reached. This is why websites that provide original source documents are so valuable. For example, www.1901censusonline.com is an excellent resource to authenticate previously discovered facts. Try to verify as far as possible at each step of your research. If you are not 100% sure who your great grandmother is, then it is ineffective spending hours and weeks researching generations back from her. It would be more productive to take one step back in order to collate the research that will confirm/deny the facts you have already discovered. This will hopefully prevent situations where weeks of research, going back to periods such as the 1300s, are found to be inaccurate due to failure to verify facts at the beginning of this process. Take heed of history An important tip when researching your family heritage is to pay attention to the evolution of names through history. Many surnames, and indeed first names, have seen their spelling change over the years. It is not uncommon to find that a family name was spelled differently only a couple of generations back. This can be true on legal and legitimate documents, as well as simply transcription errors made by those creating data. Many censuses were taken by word of mouth, and consequently the spelling of names was entirely in the hands of the census writer. This itself is often read badly at transcription time, thus making data connection very difficult. Most of the top websites do have a feedback mechanism where you can, and should, report such errors if you find them and can verify their inaccuracy. All researchers should be encourage to feedback this type of error in an attempt to make the available data ‘cleaner’ as time goes on. Consulting your family Before leaping blindly into the vast depths of your family history, it is invaluable to consult the existing members of your family first. By gathering as many dates, names and locations as possible you provide yourself with the perfect starting point from which to begin your investigation. As with the online resources, not all of this data can be verified instantly, as the memory does tend to lapse on occasion, so always be sure to correspond these findings with the information available on the Internet. Many of the sites mentioned will allow you to perform a ‘fuzzy search’. This means that even if your dates are not entirely correct or the matches do not fit perfectly system will still present results that may be of some use. Whilst consulting your family is a key resource to use in this type of genealogy, beware the ‘community’ and ‘public’ family trees. Although amateur research, and the sharing of data, can be very useful it must not be taken for granted as accurate. Many keen researchers assemble their family trees using this date and then make their findings public through these online sites. It is very easy and tempting to simply take this data as ‘fact’. If one or two other budding researchers pick up on this ‘false date’ then the source suddenly assumes extra validity. A colleague of mine highlighted the danger of this ‘false data’ as he came across a researcher claiming to be a relative of his, only for him to subsequently discover that the woman was claiming the wrong parentage for his father. Although my colleague can prove this as bogus information through varying documents he possesses, the more people that visit this data and adopt it as part of their ‘trees’ the more and more credibility the fake source attains. Whilst the use of community information can be very helpful when gathering data, awareness must be displayed towards secondary sources that have collected their records from a primary source with no validation. To summarise… The key to this type of genealogy study appears to be a clever mix of internet sources
and a great deal of hard work. Although the Internet provides what seems like consistently
accurate information it is essential to always verify and authenticate the facts against
other available sources.
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