Perhaps the most wonderful thing about family history research is that it takes researchers on a personalised journey to past worlds where their ancestors once existed. But there is another journey that a researcher will undertake along the way, and that is with regards to the records used to make such discoveries, and the experience acquired, yet which may be still required, along the way.
Our starting block
We start our research with the most obvious basic records documenting births, marriages, and deaths, known as the ‘vital records’. We begin with the recent records from the civil registration systems of the United Kingdom and Ireland, and then work our way back to the parish registers that predate them. From these we can hopefully tell when our ancestors were ‘hatched, matched and dispatched’, and gain some further inklings about their occupations, and where they resided at the moments when such records were collated. In most cases we can tie this information in to the decennial censuses from 1841-1921, and try to form family groupings to further our knowledge of their contemporary environments.
Don’t limit yourself
These records being so common to all of our ancestors is the main reason that the commercial genealogy platforms offer access to them, because they will provide an economic return for the time and effort put into doing so. However, as researchers, we can easily find ourselves trapped in the mentality that such easy to access digitised records are all that exists to document our forebears.
Push on beyond the easy stuff
Each of our ancestors were unique individuals, with individual domestic circumstances, careers, and extended families. To find out about them in more detail we need
