Genealogy: Essential Research Methods E-Book

Helen Osborn

• Herausgeber: Robert Hale
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 426

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

This book is the ideal companion for anybody researching their family tree. It provides advice and inspiration on methods and problem-solving and helps the amateur family historian understand what successful professionals do to get results, and why we should copy them. Over ten chapters, it examines the various themes that affect the success or failure of all genealogy research. This begins with an overview of common challenges genealogists encounter and continues with an examination of how to both search effectively and find the right documentary sources. Using examples from her own family history as well as client work, teacher and professional genealogist Helen Osborn demonstrates how to get the most from documents, analyse problems and build research plans. These subjects lead on to recording results, how to ensure relationships are correctly proved, organizing information and presenting your findings. This book will be particularly valuable to anyone who is stuck with their research, in addition to those who are keen to learn about advanced skills and methods used by genealogists.

Leseprobe

Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Preface

  1  The Challenges of Genealogy

  2  Effective Searching – Technique and Belief

  3  The Records Framework

  4  Find What You Need

  5  Has It Been Done Before?

  6  Analysing and Working with Documents

  7  Planning and Problem-solving

  8  Recording Information and Citing Sources

  9  Organize, Store and Pass On

10  Prove Your Research and Meet Your Challenges

Recommended Short Reading List

Bibliography

Other Sources

Index

Acknowledgements

I would particularly like to thank Sarah McAlpine and Jacky Meigh who have allowed parts of their family history to be reproduced here, and Darryl Lundy for permission to use an image from www.thepeerage.com. I am indebted also to Sherry Irvine and Tom Osborn for reading and commenting on the drafts, and to Guy Grannum. Thanks also go to the many others who have inspired me and acted as my genealogy role models. Finally, a thank you to my mother for always being interested in whatever information I uncover in my research.

Foreword

Sources, and the skills to understand them, are the key tools we need to unearth our family history. Now, with the flourishing of the internet, online catalogues and search tools make it ever-easier to discover sources, both online and in archives, that are of potential use to us as family historians. In turn, the wealth of historical sources that are accessible on the web, both national collections and more local or specialized ones, grows week by week, leaving us in the luxurious position of having ready access to millions of records in which we can search for our ancestors at any time of the day or night that we choose. However, as anyone who has begun researching their family history will know, it’s not always (in fact, rarely) as straightforward in practice.

So, we have some sources, but how do we use them to best effect, to thoroughly and accurately trace the generations before us, and how can we tackle the infamous ‘brick walls’ that may seem to blockade our route back to the past? This is where Helen Osborn’s ‘essential research methods’ come into their own, as she explains how to gain and improve the skills we all need to trace our family history successfully. Family historians often, quite rightly, see themselves as detectives, investigating the evidence from the past to glean information, and a methodical and organized approach to research is essential to ensure that you have identified your ancestors correctly.

Combining case studies and genealogical insights born from years of experience from both her professional research and personal family history, Helen gives practical advice and guidance on how to become a more skilled genealogist. Fluid and authoritative, the chapters take you through each of the stages: from actually understanding the record collections in which you are searching to thinking logically so that you can dispel preconceptions and misinformation and get to the facts; from how to cite your sources to ways in which to organize your notes to make your research intelligible and easy to use and refer to; from creating a pedigree to collaborating online.

The internet continues to make family history an ever more popular hobby, enabling people to track down and search through records that would have been far harder to come by even a decade ago. But rather than simply creating family trees quickly, let’s put the resources that the web has made so readily accessible to the best use possible, to create better family histories with full and accurate family trees. Tracing your family history truly is a voyage back to the past, and learning the essential research methods will help to ensure that you have the skills needed for a productive, problem-solving and enjoyable genealogy journey.

Helen Tovey

Editor, Family Tree

Preface

Family-history beginners get plenty of useful advice about record sources – what is available and where to find it, and a great deal of encouragement from the media to get out and ‘have a go’. By the time most people have got the census and civil registration under their belt, and been bitten by the genealogy bug, it can seem a little late to start questioning the methods used and the extra skills that should be acquired. Researching using mainly the internet has made the tendency to dive in without proper preparation even more prevalent than it was. Only when the cliché of the brick wall frustrates our research are we forced to stop and take stock. It is then that we slowly come to discover how the need for some trusty and half-forgotten old tools of the genealogy trade has never actually gone away. Don’t think that because you have been researching for years, you are immune to some common research mistakes. We can probably all hold our hands up to some basic errors at one time or another. Sadly, it is often those who have been happily and steadily working their way backwards over many years who may be the most reluctant to examine the way they go about things, yet there is always room for improvement. For my own part, writing this book has brought it home to me how I really must redouble my own efforts to practise what I preach, if only because it saves time in the long run. This book is therefore intended as a source of help for all those who are researching their family tree online or offline, and are now in need of extra techniques and inspiration in order to help them get over a problem, or to understand how to move on to the next stage in their research. It is not about record sources and what they contain because there are already many excellent books that concentrate on this. What it isabout is record contexts, methods, documentation and problem-solving.

The book takes English records and English genealogy as its main theme, although I firmly believe that all genealogists will find passages of general use, regardless of where their ancestors came from. The internet means that more and more we are able to research further and further afield, and perhaps eventually develop international standards in the most effective ways of doing research – those effective ways of course include searching online as well as offline. There is plenty of commonality between research undertaken in all the parts of the world where British and Irish peoples have ended up, as well as back in the ‘mother countries’.

It is impossible to subtract the practice of genealogy from the legal, historical and geographic framework that surrounds it, and the more I thought about general methods and good standards in genealogy research for this book, the less this framework seemed to go away. We cannot start out with a search in Lithuanian records without knowledge about Lithuania; to do so would be just foolhardy, yet many British genealogists assume they know about the records framework of Britain simply by virtue of being British. I recently came across a comment made by someone on Rootschat who said that a genealogy course required too much work because it was written about stuff ‘before the databases’. He just didn’t ‘get it’. Good genealogy methods have not been fundamentally changed by everything that has recently come online. It does not require a different set of knowledge. You still need to know about all the stuff that occurred ‘before the databases’. I hope this book will help to fill that gap by pointing out the common challenges that we all face, and show you how fundamental an understanding of historical ‘stuff’ can be.

I have thought long and hard about why there is no good up-to-date book on genealogical methods published in the UK and I have come to the conclusion that the sheer weight of record resources has simply made it much easier for writers to concentrate on describing the records, stating who created them, where they are held and what they contain, rather than wrestle with advanced information about how to do genealogy research. In order to gain the knowledge that work on many, many different family trees provides, one has to have been a professional genealogist. This book, then, tells you what the successful professionals do. Over ten chapters I examine separate themes that have a bearing on the success or failure of all genealogy research.

Chapter 1 provides an overview of the common challenges we all encounter; Chapter 2 explores the search process and examines what an effective search actually consists of; Chapters 3 and 4 look at how you can go about finding the right sources and start to understand their context; Chapter 5 asks you to consider whether someone else has already solved your problem for you, and where you can look to find out; Chapter 6 shows you how to analyse a document to make sure you really are making the most of your sources once you find them; Chapter 7 looks at problem-solving using analysis and a research plan; Chapter 8 is about recording your information correctly; Chapter 9 is all about organization and presenting your results; and Chapter 10 discusses the important question of how to prove family connections by using good proof standards in your research.

If you have ever been in the unhappy and frustrating situation of your research becoming stuck and just cannot see how to solve a problem or find the correct record or entry, you will certainly want to read on.

1

The Challenges of Genealogy

The current enthusiasm for and interest in family history, fed by the media and rapidly accelerated through the internet, actually has its origins more than forty years ago. Many would suggest that the 1970s TV series Roots is the place where it all began, although actually there had been a groundswell of interest earlier than this – certainly my own family had always been quite keen on discussing family history at all family gatherings, or so it seemed to me at the time. Wherever it began, a turning point for all hobby genealogists, at least in England, was the arrival in 1984 of the very first magazine catering to their interests, Family Tree. By comparison, the current market place is crowded with information, yet very little space is devoted to research problems in a systematic way. By contrast, in the past there was plenty of advice about both problems and pitfalls in genealogy. The writer and genealogist Pauline Litton wrote a whole series of very readable articles in Family Tree on this topic.1 And the budding genealogist who read the magazine, and perhaps took an evening class or two and served an apprenticeship among documents at the old Somerset House or St Catherine’s House, very soon had acquired a good part of the skills needed to progress, although they might have taken several years to build a family tree back to 1837. Now with so much online, it does not take half as much skill or effort to build a tree of some sort in a couple of afternoons.

It is true that some problems, such as those specific to searching the census on microfilm, have been solved by internet sites hosting indexes and original images, but by no means all of them. In addition, like a many-headed hydra, the internet cuts out one problem only to bring us more to take its place. The internet age has seen many long-standing genealogical puzzles solved, simply by the power of making millions of bits of data available online, but as fast as these are solved, more arrive. No doubt in the future some current problems will be solved, but yet more new ones created. There are now problems with websites and online indexes, and the very way that databases return results from search queries, to add to the already well-known problems with records and documents and, dare I whisper it, the researcher’s own shortcomings.

Yet it seems as though each generation of genealogists is doomed to repeat some of the errors of the past. Genealogy is not easy. In fact, it is deceptively complex, and can be very challenging, but the complexity is hidden from the beginner by a veneer of button-pushing speed brought to us by the internet. It is really important to remember that any one search does not result in an ancestor; it finds a record. Only the careful piecing together of records and analysis of results in the round brings us information about our ancestors.

Each family is unique and, in that sense, each problem or challenge you will face is also unique. Likewise, all researchers are unique in bringing their own experience (or lack of it), their preconceptions and their habits to the research process. But there are areas of commonalty.

I have identified seven common genealogical and research challenges, which I outline here and go on to explore in greater depth throughout the rest of the book. Those challenges are ones of: historical interpretation, naming, geography, indexing, belief, technique and record survival. The first six are all concerned with genealogical method, or lack of it. These can be overcome. The seventh is one we personally can do nothing about: the survival of the record we need in the first place, although there are some techniques for getting round gaps in records.

The great genealogist Anthony Wagner, Garter King of Arms and professional genealogist, stated in his book English Ancestry2 that he believed the four things vital to success in any search were: status, record, name and continuity. The first, he explained, was easily understandable. Everybody knows that the ancestry of the elite sectors of society, whether the aristocracy or the comfortable professional middle class, is easier to trace than the working man who may hardly have come into contact with the record-keepers in any meaningful way. The second and third are also self-explanatory. For the genealogist to discover anything, there has to be a record of it. No record, no tracing backwards. The type of name plays a significant part as well. John Smith is a difficult person to identify against a background of a lot of other John Smiths; Humphrey Clinker, however, gives the researcher a fighting chance. Wagner’s final point is more subtle. By continuity he means that you may have agricultural labourers with common names, but if they lived in the same parish for many generations and good records survive, then chances of success are high. Likewise, if a particular piece of property is handed down father to son, then the chances of success are higher. On the other hand, you might be pleased to discover your ancestor is called Humphrey Clinker, but if Humphrey has moved around the country, and particularly if he has moved from the country into a big town, the trail could end prematurely. What Wagner does not mention are any techniques for searching effectively, and most other genealogy books also gloss over this as though all that was required was the right name on the right record, job done, and we can all go home and put our feet up. I believe genealogy success is actually far more subtle and complex a process.

(1) The challenge of interpreting the past

Perhaps the first easy mistake that can be made is the expectation that the past is somehow just the same as the present, only in olden-day clothing and without electrical appliances. They may be ‘our’ ancestors, but they lived in a different world. For example, don’t assume that because it is easy to get divorced today, that it was just as easy or common in the past. Don’t assume that because adoptions are now subject to formal proceedings, that the same formality existed in the past. Don’t assume that a case brought before a civil court today would have been heard in a civil court in the past. Don’t even assume that the New Year started on the same day as now. The law in Britain has been constantly changing and evolving since Saxon times; this has affected the records made and kept, the people recorded in those records, and the interpretation we need to put on them. The very best professional genealogists are usually well versed in the legal and administrative system of the period they are investigating and you will need to be as well.

To be a successful genealogist you must assume nothing and be prepared to clear your mind of all preconceptions, while at the same time, and perhaps paradoxically, informing yourself of the historical legal system, the geography of the area, and the historical context. It is hard work, but ultimately worth it because your research will proceed much more smoothly with less stopping and starting, puzzling over problems. And you will become so much better informed about the lives your ancestors led.

If it were not for the archivists, librarians and other keepers of the records of the past, it would be impossible to do any meaningful research. Even more fundamentally, it is only because our society has needed to create a written record in the first place that we have any documentation of the past at all. Thankfully, modern governments and local administrations in the Western world evolved from early times into record-creating and record-keeping ones. Very often this was due to the need for a legal process surrounding the passing of land and possessions from one person to another. Where you attract lawyers, you create records. Where you create records, you create information about people and their activities, and the records that get kept and passed from generation to generation are often the ones that were originally created due to some kind of legal or administrative framework or requirement. There are more surviving records from tax collection or the justice system in the Medieval period than private letters. The cost of creating a record has also played a part in record survival. Parchment documents tend to have a higher survival rate than paper ones as they are not as fragile. Britain is blessed with one of the most complete sets of historical records of any country. In fact, we have an abundance of documentation about the past. This is due no doubt to our mainly stable administration since 1066. The main exception is the period of the Civil War in the seventeenth century, which is notable for creating many problems and gaps for genealogists.

Running alongside this continuous seam of documentation and record-keeping is an ever-evolving legal and governmental system. The law is in a continuing process of flux as new laws are enacted by each administration, old ones repealed, and all the time revisions and precedents are set by the courts. This process of law-making and revision is of great importance to historians and genealogists because it creates the framework within which we need to interpret the records made about our ancestors. Not only might the quirky laws of the past provide us with extra information about our ancestors, but having found, or not found, our ancestor in the records created as a direct result of those laws, we need to know the reasons why they are included or excluded. For example, the hearth tax of the late seventeenth century was an early attempt at a general tax that would include as many people as possible, being a tax on all domestic hearths. You may be able to use it on a simple level just to check whether your ancestors are listed. But on a deeper, more analytical level, when dealing with complex problems and interpreting the records for any given area, you will need to understand both the general exemptions and the local situation. Confusing instructions to the collectors of the tax led to many inconsistencies, and that was before the regulations were changed and local taxpayers challenged interpretations. The lists of people who paid the tax are used very frequently by genealogists, yet the lists cannot simply be removed from the whole background of regulation, local interpretation, exemptions, challenge and reinterpretation, if they are to be used and interpreted correctly. The legal system surrounding the making and granting of wills is another prime example whereby the genealogist needs to be aware of the full historical and legal background before coming to conclusions about his or her family’s circumstances based only on the seeming evidence of just the written document. Other records notorious for their ability to spread confusion and misinterpretation are title deeds to property in all periods from the thirteenth to nineteenth centuries.

There is thus a whole hinterland of historical information that lies hidden behind any particular record or document that we may use to build our family tree, and we ignore that hinterland at our peril.

When you are stuck, good questions to ask yourself are these:

•   What is the historical period?

•   Where am I searching?

•   What are the relevant laws for that place at that time?

•   What is the status of the people I am looking for?

•   Where can I find out more about this place at this time?

When interpreting the past, even individual words can provide problems or lead us into wrong assumptions. An example of this would be the word ‘gentleman’, perhaps as found on a Victorian census. What exact interpretation is the genealogist to put on this when found in the column under occupation? Was this something that had a precise meaning? How often did people exaggerate themselves in this way? How might a misinterpretation of its meaning put a block in the way of research? In this case, it is knowledge of what is normal for that society at that particular time that we need. Under an older system, the term ‘gentleman’ did have a more precise meaning. In the Medieval period it meant ‘noble’, but then came to mean a man of a status between that of a yeoman and a baron. Attempts were made to restrict it to people who could prove they had a right to bear arms, but they failed, and popular use has always been to mean those who did not work with their hands. When found on a census it can mean someone who is of higher status and who has never worked: the old landed gentry. Or it might be used by a professional man who has retired on a small private income, or it might be used by the originally more humble man who has made a bit of money and come up in the world and is now retired. I have found it describing a retired ‘Licensed Victualler’ as one among many other examples. When found on a marriage certificate it often indicates a snobbish urge by the bride or groom to aggrandize their parents’ circumstances.

Thus in interpreting the past, the challenge we face is to both know about and take into account not only a strict definition of the law or societal rules, but also what was the popular usage and actual and accepted practice, because there can often be a difference between legal use and popular use of a term or interpretation of a law.

(2) The challenge of names and identifications

The biggest clue in the whole detective puzzle can also turn out to be the biggest red herring and lead the researcher seriously astray. I am talking, of course, about the surname. The name being researched is one of Wagner’s four factors influencing genealogical success in England,3 and it will be a factor in success in many other countries as well. It can also be a huge challenge.

The good genealogist takes care to read and understand a little about the history of surnames, how they have evolved and changed over time, and how variations of spelling arise. This is as true for any English surname as it is for European surnames, or Jewish surnames. Recent work on surnames and their history has turned up some surprising results and the work of both David Hey and George Redmonds should be sought out, particularly if you have ancestors from Yorkshire and Lancashire. Their recent book on the subject was published by Oxford University Press in 2011 as Surnames, DNA, and Family History.4 The Guild of One-Name Studies has members working on a large number of more rare surnames and their register of members’ interests can be checked to see if your own names are among those being researched. Even more recently, work combining surname studies and DNA analysis is also producing some very interesting results. It is a beginner’s mistake to think that there could be no genetic connection between people of similar but differently spelled surnames.

A lot of emphasis in genealogy writing is put on making sure you check spelling variations. Most genealogists beyond the basics will have come across their surname spelled slightly differently (or maybe very differently) both in an index and in an original record. Some of these differences are obvious and easy to spot in a written index: Gardener, Gardiner, Gardner, for example. Others are much more difficult. Surnames that begin with a vowel sound – for example, Izzard – are awkward to look up when they could also start with a Y or an E. The ‘zz’ sound is often written as ‘s’ or ‘ss’.

Names can be mis-indexed and mis-transcribed so that they become almost impossible to find. This happens most frequently when a rare surname is misunderstood to be a common name. For a long time I searched for Maria Julia Rigby, until finally I found the missing information that told me the surname was actually written as Righy, at least for a couple of generations; it may turn out to be something quite else if I manage to trace the family back further – Riggi is now looking like a distinct possibility in fact. Finally, I was able to find her marriage and break down this particular brick wall.

People do, and did, sometimes change their names. This was not very common, but it did happen. I have most commonly found changes of name in the context of people of Jewish or foreign ancestry in London anglicizing a name, or perhaps changing to a completely different name in order to become more British. In these cases it is the fitting together of lots of pieces of the genealogical puzzle that prove that the family were using two names. It is not often understood that, at least under English law, anybody can call themselves anything they want. As long as they don’t assume someone else’s identity, or use a false name with intent to deceive, they are not breaking a law. I have only come across one case of deliberate assumption of another person’s identity in a genealogy case, although a few clients have mistakenly believed that this has occurred in their family. People often assume when they cannot find an ancestor that he/she must have changed his/her name, but all other avenues should be explored first, because it is actually not the most likely thing to have happened.

Probably the biggest challenge to research is a very common name. There are no particularly special techniques that will help and the main method is to research in the same way that you would with uncommon names, but be even more methodical, write everything down, try to concentrate on one problem at a time, and do not make leaps and assumptions about relationships without careful consideration. When you have more than one candidate, you will have to ‘kill off’ one or more of them, so follow them all up. Who did they marry, what happened to them?

Ironically, for the unsuspecting researcher, uncommon names can lead you into greater misinterpretation and difficulties than common names. It is too easy to jump to conclusions that there must be relationships. I had an example of this recently with a client who had a name that was rare in almost every part of the British Isles, except for two places, and in one of those – which happened to be Cheshire – it was not uncommon at all. His assumption, because he did not himself live in Cheshire and had never or rarely come across anyone with his name, was that his family must be closely related to another family of the same name that had ended up in London. He had even spent a lot of time and money researching the line into Australia, but unfortunately I could find no documentary evidence that any relationship did in fact exist, other than a coincidence of surname. Perhaps he has since managed to get a group of people together with the surname and got their DNA tested as this would be one way to prove conclusively if there was in fact a relationship.

A final challenge of names and identity that is more common than you might think is the propensity of men to take two wives who share the same first name. Possibly a gap between children might alert you; it can be very difficult to spot the two women named Mary Smith and Mary Jones who both married Daniel Johnson, unless you use all of the techniques that will be discussed later in the book.

It is far too easy to jump to conclusions about identity and relationships based solely on coincidence of names, and the challenge for all of us is to make sure this does not happen in our own research.

(3) The challenge of place

All events happen somewhere. Every birth, marriage and death is associated with a place. People live and study in places. It is therefore very important that the genealogy researcher has a good understanding of the geographic area within which these events happened and how that may have differed in the past. As far as the legal framework is concerned, place will also equate to jurisdiction. When searching for a will, for example, you may need to know the ecclesiastical jurisdiction and where exactly the boundaries were, before you can find out where the records are now kept. If your ancestor died in Sussex before 1858, for example, you will need to know whether the parish fell into the Archdeaconry of Chichester or the Archdeaconry of Lewes, or whether it was outside both those jurisdictions and came under the Deanery of Battle or South Malling or Pagham and Tarring or the diocese of Rochester. Each county has a similarly complicated pattern of places where probate might have been proved in the years prior to 1858 when a national probate calendar first came into being. The best published guide to these is still Gibson’s and Churchill’s Probate Jurisdictions.5 Andrew Millard is building an online supplement to Probate Jurisdictions hosted by Durham University at www.dur.ac.uk/a.r.millard/genealogy/probate.php. Both resources should be used together. There is no better example of a very complex geographical picture than in the records created for the purposes of probate.

Place names also change, and places can even come and go completely. Anybody researching in Eastern Europe will know how invasion, conquest and capture changed places, their names, and even the country they were in. But places alter in Britain too, albeit on a lesser scale. A local place name may be used in a document that does not appear in a gazetteer, and place names change in subtle ways over time. You may come across particular problems with Welsh place names. In the past they were anglicized, then they reverted to a Welsh form, so that modern maps show Welsh place names, and now even places that always had English names are being converted to Welsh for the purposes of road signs and maps. Just as place names change over time, so too do industries, employ-ment opportunities, agricultural practices, and of course transport.

Other problems and challenges with place can arise in relation to the continuity of our ancestors in any one location. Some areas suffered constant migrations and it may be necessary for you to find out whether a parish was welcoming to newcomers or contained waste ground that could be moved on to, or whether a parish was closed to incomers with one large landowner controlling the parish administration. Big towns suck in migrants, and travel routes into and out of places may have to be studied. The movement of people between two places may be because a special relationship existed between two towns in the past – for example, they both carried on the same trades, and when work was scarce in one town it was sought in another. People may have migrated for a number of economic reasons. You may be doing research because you know where your ancestors ended up, but not where they came from. The opposite kind of research may be done because you know they disappeared, but where did they go?

I can summarize the hidden importance of place in two ways, because it is not just about finding the name of the village or parish and locating it on a modern map. First, it is important to know about topography. This is the lie of the land, the geographical features that may determine not only how they lived, but where they came from and where they went. Second, it is important to know about jurisdiction. Genealogists need to know who ruled over this place. What area did they rule over, where were the courts held, and where are the records held now?

(4) Understanding and working with indexes

A good name and place index is most definitely the researcher’s friend, and even a not very good index can still be helpful. Using an index is more than likely the way we find ourselves looking at the records in the first place. Almost all the genealogy websites you use regularly will include or be based around an index or indexes, and of course every single time you use a search engine to find something on the internet you are also using a complex indexing system, which is designed to find and retrieve words from the billions of words found on the millions of existing websites. If you have an uncommon surname, no doubt you look in every index you can find to see if the name appears. I spent a very happy day or so extracting all my Beachcroft entries from all the printed parish register volumes of the Harleian Society6 and in the Phillimore parish series when I started out, managing to construct some rudimentary trees and add substantially to my knowledge of the family. But sitting in a library going through the indexes in printed volumes is now an old-fashioned method because so many of our indexes are online.

Apart from those publications that are made by the genealogy community, such as the Harleian Society, the printed index at the back of a book should never be relied upon to be a good index of all the names that may possibly appear in that volume. Often I have been frustrated with an index because it only partly indexes the people in the book; the most common problem being that only the people of higher status are indexed and this is particularly frequent in older volumes.

Commercial online indexes

Indexes are great when they produce the results you need, and frustrating and baffling when they don’t. But even a positive result can mask a problem with the index, and when you draw a blank you need to know why. No web-based index is going to draw attention to its shortcomings on the first page. And even if it did, most people wouldn’t read it. They want to find people, not bother with detail. Good researchers, on the other hand, learn to work out where the gaps lie. The major problem with any index, whether it is printed at the back of a book, or part of a database such as those that bring us the census returns online, is that there are always mistakes in the indexing process. Always. Indexes for major series of records that are rushed online are particularly suspect. Some of the data websites in the past have been very quick to publish only partly correctly indexed material, and slow to rectify problems. They thereby add an extra layer of complexity for the unwary researcher. The big data websites, and even government archive-backed projects, get the indexing done by hand by the cheapest bidder, who may be in India or the Prison Service.

Indexes by volunteers

The biggest and best-known series of genealogical indexes are held by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the Mormons. Their project to index parish registers and other vital records on a worldwide basis became known as the International Genealogical Index (the IGI). Originally available on microfiche, and then on CD, since 2001 the IGI has been online and is free to use. Part of a very ambitious project to make record sources available from all over the world in one place, the IGI also exemplifies many of the problems caused by using indexes to do genealogy research. Because the IGI has been available for a relatively long time, most genealogists are well aware of its pitfalls, but the main trap has to be that it is a very incomplete index. Not only does it not index all the parishes in England and Wales, but within each parish it does not index all the possible available records. The reasons for this are historical and varied, but there are methods for getting round the deficiencies of the IGI (as there are for any incomplete index), including going to the original un-indexed record and reading through it all. The IGI has recently been combined with other indexes held by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to form a seamless set of searchable indexes all at the Family Search website (www.familysearch.org).

An obvious example is where a partial index leads you astray and an uncommon name gives you unwarranted confidence. If you are searching for a baptism of a Joseph BEACHCROFT in Derbyshire in the 1700s, you might feel confident that with an age range of only one or two years, there would not be too many of them. But what if there are two Joseph BEACHCROFTS of the right age, but only one of them is uncovered by an IGI search? The other candidate is hidden to you in a parish not covered by the IGI. If the name was more common you would never jump to the conclusion that you had found the correct one, but with uncommon names the likelihood is that you would feel it safe to assume you had found the right person.

Other volunteer-led indexing projects, such as those organized and run through the many Family History Societies, will also suffer from similar problems, albeit on a much smaller scale. Generally, Family History Society members should be reliable as indexers because they will know the local area, but ultimately human error will always come into play and entries may be missed, garbled or otherwise obscured.

The moral of the story is to be very careful when working with both partial indexes as well as indexes that appear to be complete. You may have heard some off-putting stories about the IGI, so much so that you do not trust it at all. But that would be a common mistake of application. When faced with an index, the first bit of research needs to be on the index itself, not the people. The careful and effective researcher will ask: Who compiled it? For what purpose? What does it index? How complete is it? Allied to this is knowledge about the version of the index. Many indexes worked on by volunteers appear in different versions. For example, you might make a search in the National Burial Index (available as a set of CDs from the Federation of Family History Societies), but was that search in version 1 or version 3 of the index? Version 3 is more recent and more complete.

(5) Overcoming belief – the sceptical enquirer

Family stories have a whole lot to answer for. Sometimes they contain a germ of truth, slightly changed by each person they have passed through, like a game of Chinese whispers. Many of my clients originally came to me because they wished to prove or disprove a family story. The stories range from the plain snobbish, to the downright mysterious.

Migration stories are widespread, so much so that social anthropologists have studied and found common themes in migration stories that occur worldwide. In other words, your firmly held belief that your ancestor left his homeland under a cloud, in disgrace, due to marrying the wrong girl (tick the one applicable to you), suffered terribly on the journey (actually probably true), and arrived only to have all his belongings stolen, but then was helped by a kind stranger and other variations on this theme, may not actually be true in all its detail, but be a construct later put on the truth. Genealogists starting with family stories that include the migration of one original ancestor should be prepared to take the whole story, or at least parts of the story, with a pinch of salt – in other words, leave aside their belief and turn into a sceptical enquirer. On the other hand, some persistent oral traditions shared by an extended family over a long period often do turn out to be essentially true, although the detail has been lost.

There are a few common genealogy myths that are fairly easily disproved, such as that someone has direct ancestry from a famous person not known to have had any children; or that some unclaimed fortune survives lying in Chancery. Illegitimate descent from royalty is less easy to disprove without the help of DNA testing, but it too is a surprisingly common belief. Even more common is the theme of the pregnant servant girl with the offspring of aristocracy. Perhaps more likely is the pregnant servant with the offspring of the second footman, but of course that is a much less romantic story. Many stories and family beliefs have been fuelled by a stiff upper lip attitude to family. Many people today take the failure of Mum or Granny to speak about the past as a sign that something ‘dark’ or mysterious must have happened, when in fact the truth is that previous generations did not speak about family matters and certainly not in front of the children. For them, family matters were ordinary, but private. This may or may not put certain barriers in front of your research, but it pays to remember that things that we now discuss quite openly, like marital breakdown or illegitimacy, were taboo subjects in the past.

Another and very interesting aspect of this is that memory is a very slippery thing and can play you false in many ways. This can range from completely forgetting or falsely remembering the year a parent or grandparent died, thus creating a false trail for others to follow when writing up a family tree or making notes on the family history for posterity, to actually inventing something. I have an example of this ‘inventing’ which I did myself; and if I had not turned into a researcher keen to find out the truth, then this invented story might well have survived to be passed down the generations. The invention started with the adults in my own family talking about family history, being half listened to by my adolescent self. The conversation was about the surname Eden, which is in the family. Was there a connection with Anthony Eden? How common was the name? By the time I had became interested in the story from a research point of view, I had extrapolated the vague memory of this overheard conversation into a memory that my grandmother had said there was a definite connection with Sir Anthony Eden. I started out my research into the Eden family with this belief. Of course, it is not true. Our Eden line does not appear to link up in any way with the line of the former Prime Minister.

Belief can also exist in the ‘truth’ of the written or printed word, and also in the words of our ancestors as recorded on the census or on a certificate. These beliefs can be equally limiting to your research and the only way is to go forwards, trusting nothing and no one until verified with several independent bits of evidence. American genealogists who are tracing lines from early emigrants such as the Mayflower Pilgrims have a great many examples of false belief in the printed word. There are many thousands of words written about some of these early emigrants by genealogists who have not been very concerned with accuracy. They have been published in many types of book and have been picked up and repeated into other books and pedigree charts. Many of these false pedigrees are all over the internet. Suffice it to say that you would do well to disbelieve most printed pedigrees until you can check them against original sources, or unless the author has provided a comprehensive set of citations to original sources, and not just secondary works.

(6) The challenge of technique

Problems of technique are nearly always overcome to some extent by constant practice. There are, however, many bad habits that are difficult to shake off. I still sometimes suffer from forgetting to write down all the details of a search, or taking the skimpiest of notes, telling myself that I will remember the detail later – and of course I don’t. In so many ways it is ‘less haste, more speed’.

In the good old days, when genealogists spent hours sitting at a microfilm reader, the slow pace of turning the handle to read everything page by page meant that it was far easier to remember to stop and write something down. Whereas the speed with which you can jump from result to result using a computer means you have to force yourself to slow the pace down enough to take note of what you are doing. Of course it no longer always means that if you miss something, you might miss it for ever because you may never get that particular microfilm out of its box again and spend the two or three hours needed to go through it. It is more likely that an internet search will be repeated at some point because it is much easier to do it again. However, it is still wasting your time if you do not force yourself to make notes of what you find and where you find it. This is a habit that is hard to come by, but becomes easier as you practise. I discuss why we should all be taking notes in Chapter 8 on documenting your research.

Other problems of technique and habit are easier to overcome. Most beginners to new websites want to search right away and not bother with reading any extra information. But those who are wiser know that it is vital to check what information is being offered, find out the quirks of the search facility, and read all the instructions first. This can save you hours of frustration and turn a negative search into a positive one.

Another problem with rushing to find something is that you probably will not search for all the surname variants you need to try. When you scan a whole page of text, or a printed index in a book, it is usually fairly obvious when a surname variant presents itself. When using an online index it is very easy to forget to search using a number of different variants, or to try some and not others.

Other very common problems of technique include not keeping track of exactly which records you have searched for each ancestor, and not keeping your records in order so that you can easily find them again. It is useful to know when it might be necessary to make a full extract of all occurrences of your surname from a document, and when you can skip this. However, the most common failing is to forget to document your sources as you actually do the research. The importance of correct documentation is discussed further in Chapters 8 and 9.

Most people begin their genealogy journey using the internet and there is no reason not to do so. But you do need to recognize the particular challenges that are inherent in internet searching. The speed with which one can find results means that proper recording of searches and sources can fall by the wayside. Second, there are wide differences in the way website databases return results – and this is not always obvious; and, third, there is also variation in the way online catalogues work. The speed with which some aspects of research can now be accomplished means that many newcomers are taught to have high expectations. Eventually, this will lead to the other side of the same coin: a propensity to give up a search too readily.

I do believe that successful genealogists have a certain type of personality. They tend to be methodical, analytical, painstaking, organized and tidy, and perhaps stubborn in their searches. If your character type is the opposite to this, then your own personal challenge will be to recognize this fact and work hard to remember to write things down, not get distracted, keep your records in order, and do all those other things that do not come naturally to you.

Finally, another important technique is the ability to find out exactly what survives that will be relevant to your research and where to access it. We look further at this in Chapter 4.

(7) The challenge of record survival

There is no doubt about it, the records you need in order to take all your ancestral lines back to the next generation, and the one beyond that, and so on and so on, do not survive.

Great Britain is blessed with some of the most record-rich archives in the world. We should be very grateful to past record-keepers who stored the records away in the first place and didn’t just use them to light a fire. We are also lucky with our climate which, although damp, at least is not hot and steamy with a subsequent rapid rate of decay. Once in an official archive or repository, the standard of care has usually been good, but records suffer from many problems before they get to the state of being accorded the status and protection of archives. While they are in day-to-day use by the people who created them, they of course are subject to all the normal wear and tear and to being torn, having ink spilled over them, suffering poor storage conditions in the various cellars in which they are almost automatically allocated, and so on. Just one or two stories from the record-keeping past will show you how precarious a journey most of our records have had.