Your family history BMD self-help guide
When I was a child my mother bought a book called something like ‘The Family Doctor’. By answering a series of yes/no answers to the questions in the book you could end up diagnosing yourself with all sorts of things, which, with the glibness of a healthy child, I thoroughly enjoyed doing.
Over the years, I’ve noticed that when advised where to start with their family history, the new genealogy enthusiast is always given the same steps to take: start with yourself, note it all down, and ask your relations (particularly the older members of the family) for further clues, such as newspaper clippings, documents, photos etc – then progress on to the birth, marriage and death indexes and the census returns. This is all excellent and sound advice. Yet what I’ve also noticed is that very often people won’t ask such a broad-brush question as to ‘how to start doing family history’. They’re keen to look into something specific. Here, by way of example, we’re going to look at BMD records.
How does the family history selfhelp guide work?
To follow are some of the sorts of questions that we all ask ourselves in order to find the information we need. The aim of this self-help guide is to provide a few pointers to help people dive
