Discover your family history

Getting started
So how do you go about creating a family tree? Start with yourself and your immediate family. Put their names on index cards and begin gathering details, such as when they were born, when they got married, had children and so on.

Include important events that may affect the search ­ for example if they moved house, if someone remarried or if they adopted one or more children. Get copies of any relevant documents to support relatives’ recollections and to use later, should you decide to jazz up the tree with pictures.

If it’s not possible to talk to relatives face-to-face, put together a questionnaire and post it to them, remembering to include a snippet from the family history to get their attention and encourage them join in.

Once the immediate family has been canvassed, move the search online, starting with records for births, marriages and deaths (these started in 1837). Then move further back to gather information from various censuses, which have been taken in the UK every 10 years since 1801 (remember that the 100 year rule means that the latest census we can currently view is from 1901). After that, it’s off in search of parish and probate records, which in some cases go back to the 1500s.

There are a few free sources that are worth investigating, including the National Archives, Family Records, the FreeCEN census project and the GENUKI virtual reference library. Those sites that don’t contain actual records are still useful for pointing visitors towards sources for original documents.

It’s also worth looking at military records and overseas sites, such as The Commonwealth War Graves Commission which has details of 1.7 million services personnel who died in both World Wars, and the Imperial War Museum, which has good leaflets to download that can help with tracing service personnel.

Then there’s the India Office which has details of 300,000 births, baptisms, marriages and deaths of British and Europeans who lived there between 1600 and 1949, just after the partition.

Moving Here is designed for families that came to the UK from overseas in the past 200 years.

A good general source for genealogy sites is Cyndi’s List, which has hundreds of links, including nearly 10,000 websites created by individuals.

Creating a family tree online
Now let’s look at how to use one of the best paid-for sites, www.ancestry.co.uk, to create a simple family tree. Ancestry lets visitors try out some of the basic services on offer without paying.

At the opening screen, type in your first, middle and family names into the box, select your gender and then click on the Get Started button. At the next screen, click on the Add father button and then complete the online form with as many details as possible.

Don’t be concerned about leaving parts of the form blank, as missing information can be filled in later. Click on Save and at the next screen fill in the details that allow Ancestry to create a free account. Leave the first option in the dialogue box ticked, as this will allow other people (except living relatives) to view the tree and possibly help with it later on.

After a moment Ancestry creates a swish-looking outline for a family tree. There’s no information of interest in it yet, but it’s now up to us to fill in the blanks. Fortunately, Ancestry has more than five million records online and with any luck the first thing you’ll see displayed on the screen will be a little message to indicate that the site has found some possible matches for the first name you typed in.

Clicking on the Ancestry Hints button takes us to a screen where the site suggests a couple of likely matches. Click on Accept or Ignore to incorporate the details of any of the people listed here into the tree. Amazingly, one of our suggestions is correct and supplies the missing details, so we can click on the Attach link as shown in the screenshot above.

At this point Ancestry will encourage you to take out a membership or sign up for a free 14-day trial. We suggest you accept the trial to explore the service a bit further and see if you find it useful. The annual membership costs £79.95.

Having created the simplest of trees, there’s plenty more we can do. For example, Ancestry lets us browse census records by county, search military archives, watch wartime newsreels, examine court, land and probate records and newspaper obituaries as well as family trees submitted by other members.

Along the way it’s possible to add photos, keep notes in a special software Shoebox to refer to later and invite other family members to contribute to your tree. It’s a good resource and one that’s well worth investigating during your 14-day trial to see how much fun it is to play family detective.