Delving into your family's past is one of the most fulfilling things you'll ever do and getting started has never been easier. If you're new to the fascinating world of genealogy research, follow these four simple steps and you'll be well on your way to a flourishing family tree in no time. 1. What do you think you know? Write it down: First things first. Write down everything you already know about your family, with a question mark next to any…
If you're just getting started with your family history, it can be tricky to know where to look first. As one of the most recent publicly available record collections covering all of England and Wales, the 1939 Register is an obvious jumping-off point.Watch our video masterclass to find out why and how to make the most of this wartime Domesday Book.Throughout the masterclass, which was recorded live, viewers put their questions to our team of in-house experts. A select…
The year 1837 is a crucial one for genealogists because that's when the General Register Office (GRO) was established in the UK. For the first time, a central national index of all births, marriages and deaths registered in England and Wales was formed.This landmark moment in British history has helped millions explore their family trees ever since and made finding family in Victorian Britain relatively straightforward. 1. Start with birth certificates: Birth certificates will be one of the first types of…
Getting started with searching Findmypast's records is easy. Our billions of individual records are divided into categories. Here's a summary of what you can expect to find in each of those collections and how they'll help your family research. Birth, marriage, death & parish records: This is one of the categories of records you'll probably use most often. These records, commonly known as BMDs, detail the most important events in your ancestors' lives and are essential for every family historian. Parish…
On the night of 2 April 1911 census enumerators were collecting the details of households across Britain. Still battling towards their goal of universal suffrage, tens of thousands of women decided to boycott the census by resisting being counted in protest at the government's refusal to grant them a vote. Many women hid and attempted to confuse enumerators by travelling to different addresses throughout the night, while others opted for a more creative approach. Uncovered: Emily Davison Hiding in Parliament's Crypt in 1911:…
To successfully build a family tree you'll need to use information on the family members you already know about to discover those you don't. The documents that help you do this can vary from prisoner lists to business indexes, military records to archived newspapers, but while those resources can be amazing for painting a picture of what your ancestor may have been like as a person, more often than not it's BMDs that allow you to identify them in the…
We've all been new to family history at some stage, and we'd be lying if we said we hadn't made (and continue to make) a few mistakes here and there. Luckily, genealogy is a marathon, not a sprint, and so there's time to learn from our errors and become better researchers along the way. Here are a few of the mistakes we made when we started out that we are sharing in the hope you'll avoid making the same ones.…