How to start your family history research
By Jeremy Palmer, Dip. Gen.
Information from relatives
Birth, marriage and death certificates
Convict records
Census records
Family stories
How to record your information
Family history can be an immensely rich and rewarding pastime. By researching your own family history you can turn history from dry dates and places of events to something much more personal and touching. Knowing that your ancestors were at a particular place at a particular time in history can really bring the importance of it home to you in ways reading a history book cannot do.
Information from relatives
Family history research involves step by step detective work moving on from known facts to earlier unknown information. In order to make the best possible start it is important to gather as much information as possible from other family members. Your parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents (if you are lucky enough for them still to be around to ask) may have a great deal of useful details of names, dates and places which they can give to you to start you off on your quest. So talking to your relatives to see what information they can provide should always be your first step. Ask them about their childhood and what they can remember about their own parents and grandparents. By this manner you may be lucky enough to be able to take your family history back seventy, eighty or even a hundred years in a few afternoons. It is important to make sure that you check the facts given to you as peoples’ memories can play tricks with them, especially after a along period of time. You want to start off with as much information as possible but it needs to good information as well.
Birth, marriage and death certificates
Once you have established a firm starting point your next step will depend to a certain extent upon how far back your family history information has taken you. Most researchers will need to seek relevant birth, marriage and death certificates for family members. These records are kept individually by each state with some states having the indexes to their material available online. For example the New South Wales birth, marriage and death indexes are available online at
http://www.bdm.nsw.gov.au/familyHistory/familyHistory.htm. Those researchers with ancestors from Victoria are doubly fortunate in that the indexes as well as the individual certificates are available online at
http://online.justice.vic.gov.au/bdm/home.
It is therefore possible to search for and download the
certificates directly to your computer for birth, marriage
and death material in Victoria.
Some of the other states, such as Western Australia and
Queensland, have online indexes for more limited time
periods, but others are not quite so advanced and indexes
to their births, marriages and deaths must be consulted
on microfiche.
These are usually available at the state archives, the
state library and many of the larger libraries throughout
the state. Each state began its system of registration as
a slightly different date – Tasmania was the first to
begin in 1839 followed by Western Australia in 1841.
South Australia began recording its births, marriages and
deaths in 1842, but it wasn’t until the 1850s that this
procedure was followed in the eastern states. Victoria
began in 1853 and New South Wales and Queensland followed
suit in 1856. Northern Territory records begin in 1870 and
those of the ACT started in 1930 (although events before
this date will be found in the NSW indexes). A combination
of birth, marriage and death certificates should therefore
take you back to ancestors who were alive in the
mid 19th century.
The death certificates of the various Australian states
are especially helpful as they record information about
where and when the person concerned was born, together
with the names of his or her parents. They also mention
how long the deceased had spent in Australia and so death
certificates can therefore be a key resource in identifying
your migrant ancestors and the location in which they
originated outside of this country.
Convict records
The internet has revolutionised the way family history research has been undertaken in the last five years as more and more material is being made available via the world wide web. Ancestry.com.au has made available the records relating to
convict transportees from the UK to Australia for the period 1788 – 1868. If you are lucky enough to have a convict ancestor (something much sought after) then this material will allow you to discover the date and place of your convict’s trial. Local newspaper and court records in the UK will give you further details about the offence in question and will allow you to discover exactly what it was that your criminal ancestor did that resulted in them being shipped over 10,000 miles from their home.
Census records
If your ancestor arrived in Australia as a free settler in the later 19th century then the records of the
UK census will probably be helpful to you. The census records have been digitised and indexed by Ancestry.com.au and provide useful details about people in England, Wales and Scotland between 1841 and 1901. They also act as link to earlier parish material through which you can take your ancestry back in to the 18th century and even earlier. Once you have identified the parish where your ancestors were living in their homeland, you may find that they lived there generation after generation for hundreds of years before.
Family stories
Many people begin research with a family story or rumour – perhaps your ancestor was related to royalty, or was the illegitimate son of a nobleman. It is best to leave these stories aside and concentrate on tracing your own individual ancestry to see where this leads you. If the story is true, this will undoubtedly become apparent during research. If the story is untrue, or greatly exaggerated (as the majority of them are) then time will not have been wasted trying to pin down non-existent facts. Worse still, by trying to ‘force’ a link to fit the story you may end up tracing someone else’s ancestors entirely at the cost of ignoring your own.
Similarly, people of the same name are not always related and many people with a ‘famous’ name spend a lot of time trying to find a link to their supposedly famous relative. There are thousands of people in the world named Cook and many of them will have been told by their family that there is a rumour that Captain James Cook is an ancestor. Unfortunately, like many families, the line of Captain Cook died out in the Cook name with his sons and so anyone named Cook today will not be related to him.
How to record your information
You will also need to record the information, and the sources of the information, in an organised and easily retrievable manner. You will start to amass a great deal of information very quickly and you need to be able to file and order this accordingly so that you can return to it when required. Many notes may be made on the backs of envelopes and on scraps of paper and it easy to lose track of these unless you have an efficient system. There are numerous ways to file your research– from manual systems in ring binders and index cards through to specially designed computer databases. Perhaps the simplest and easiest way to start off is to use the
Family Tree tool on the Ancestry.com.au website. This allows you to enter information into your family tree so that you can see exactly what you have discovered about each person. It will also show how each of your ancestors are related to each other. The information can be displayed in various ways - you can show a summary of everything you know about a particular person as well as viewing a master family tree diagram showing the family as a whole. The ‘Family Tree’ tool will also allow you to share your findings with other members of your family, friends and other researchers interested in the same family. By recording what you do know about your ancestors your records, in whatever form they take, will show you what there is still to be discovered. Logical and sensible research steps are needed to make sure that you use your research time, be it on the internet, or in a local archive as effectively as possible. This will help you avoid frustration and confusion.
Each family’s history will be different and even each family line in your own ancestry may be quite unique. It is up to you to decide which family lines you wish to trace. Many people concentrate on just their surname line, or the ancestry of their mother and father but as you progress back at each generation more and more families will be available for you to research as the family of the brides marrying into the main line are discovered. Researching your entire ancestry at the same time can therefore be an enormous task and it may be best to concentrate on one or two lines at a time to avoid confusion. The other lines will still be there for you to turn to when you want a change of scene. Our ancestors certainly aren’t going anywhere!
Jeremy Palmer has been a full time professional genealogist since 1992. He was the Registrar at The Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies in Canterbury, England for many years before emigrating to Australia where he now runs his own research business which specialises in tracing the British origins of families in Australia and New Zealand. He also lectures on a wide variety of family history topics for the Society of Australian Genealogists.
