It's all relative

I chose to use Ancestry.co.uk as my starting point. My mother-in-law had been using Geni, which offers a free family tree for you to create. However, I found that I couldn’t really search for a great deal through Geni without paying. I went to Ancestry initially because they offered a free month. You have to set up a subscription and add your payment details to get the free trial but as long as you remember to cancel your trial within the month, then no payment will be taken (if you cancel anytime within the month, you still get the full month’s access). I went for the highest level package, as the most information could be gained from it (records outside the UK, plus full access to all the UK records and searches). A few of the more popular sites do offer a short free trial if you were just planning to see how it went, or were just looking for minimal information. After testing out most of the major ones, I did find that Ancestry got me the furthest.

After a free trial on Ancestry, your tree will remain accessible to you (and I’m assuming the same will probably true of other sites where you start building a tree). You can still add to it and amend it. You can still search for records, but the information available without a subscription is a little bare. I don’t currently have a subscription and wanted to just review an additional record I had added, and I couldn’t actually see any of the information that would have been of use to me.

Another downside to Ancestry (and possibly some of the other sites), is the tool that allows you to match your family details to other people who are looking for the same people, and from there, it is possible to build up your tree. However, in my experience, this isn’t a foolproof system as not all the links are correct. It only takes one person to make an error by linking a person to their tree. Then someone else sees their tree and think, well x and y match my tree so a and b must also match. I did this the first time I used the site. I just kept using the tools that matched me to other trees. When I came back to the tree, I decided to start again and not use the matching tools unless I could back up the link with my research. There were a few links that turned out to be incorrect so I had to review my tree on the wall. It’s great having the tools available to match up information as so many of us may be related way back down the line, but the tools will only work if we know that people are actually researching their trees, rather than just following other people’s “research”.

Other subscriptions sites I found useful were The Genealogist, My Heritage and Geneanet, along with the Geni one I mentioned earlier. I also discovered local sites that covered baptism, marriage and burial information. I was looking for family in the Durham/Newcastle area and the Wigan area, and I have to say the site OnLine Parish Clerks project for the County of Lancashire https://www.lan-opc.org.uk/index.html was particularly useful. Durham have a similar site but you have to pay to view records.

In the summer when I first started this process, I also picked up a couple of books from the library on genealogy. They were sort of useful but there were so many books to pick from, it was hard to know if I was getting one worthwhile. There was a lot of information in both the books I picked up but I think I did find a few mentions of sites that would help. I also downloaded some templates from the internet of blank family trees (the spaces are too small if you go past about 6 generations, so I have 6 generations and then an arrow and a key linking to a new page but the only way to view everything was to display it on my wall). I also downloaded some information sheets that I could fill in – I found some for individuals and some for couples that were useful because it listed their children and also showed where people were based on the census information between 1841 and 1911. Pinterest is also useful for ways of displaying your information.

My next step is to go and visit some graveyards, to get some pictures of gravestones, and confirm any details that I can. I’m lucky in that a large proportion of my father’s paternal side were mostly buried in about 4 graveyards around the Wigan area (not too far from my location in Salford). I would also like to go and visit a Family History Library at some point, just to see what information they hold on their records (more information on the Family History Library records to come later).

My last grandparent died on Christmas Day 2018. I was lucky enough to have made it to my mid-30s and therefore got so spend a lot of time with grandparents through my life. My grandmother had dementia so the last 6 years or so of her life weren’t the same. After her death, my daughter asked me questions about her great-gran’s life as a child, and I regret to say, I couldn’t answer her questions. I approached my aunt who helped.

Last year, my mother-in-law, who had been researching her family for a while, asked me to provide details of my family so she could add my side of the family to her tree. At the time, I saw that I could get a month’s free subscription to Ancestry.co.uk, so I decided to see how much information I could find out myself and then pass it on to her. I found myself getting hooked on genealogy, and I spend hours while the children were at school just building up my tree as much as possible. My free month ended at the same time as the summer holidays began. I knew there was no point paying for a subscription when I had two children to entertain for 6 weeks, so I left it alone for a while.

I went back to it after the children had gone back to school. I paid for a subscription to Ancestry.co.uk, and a few other sites that I will come back to later, mainly because it can be very difficult to access many records without payment. There are some very good free sites if you can track down the correct ones for your area etc. I don’t profess to be any kind of expert in this field, I’m learning as I go along.

Over the next few months, up to Christmas 2019, I continued to research. The initial family tree I created in July was taken apart and started again, confirming more details than previously, ensuring that I wasn’t just following other people’s lines. On my father’s side, I originally managed to get such a long line of people that the only way I could view the tree as a whole was to create a large tree on the wall of my office (I printed off all the names and then stuck them in the right places with blue tack. After going back over the trees in more detail, some of these original details were found to be incorrect and there is one line that I can’t currently confirm as going back as far as I first thought. The picture below shows what’s left of it (part of it fell off, and I had to remove some incorrect names).

I will use this blog as a sort of personal diary for myself, on where I am up to with my own family, as well as information that I can give on sites I have used, any help that I can give to other people in the same situation etc. I would quite like all this information to be out there so that my own children can access it one day, so that they don’t have the same problem as me, and leave it too late to ask people in person.

Where to start with your family tree

Researching my family history