getting started - 2
WHAT NEXT?
Birth, Marriages and Death certificates
You need to determine from your information what you need next. If you have say a Grandfather who was born about 1906 in Ormskirk you can look on the St Catherines index which is the index of Birth, Marriages and Deaths for England and Wales (Scotland and Ireland each have their own). The indexes start in 1837 and are arranged in quarters - January to March, April to June, July to September and October to December, and can be found in some libraries, Local Studies and Record Offices.
Using the St Catherines sheet and starting from the nearest date (remember - the Quarters are when the entries were registered, ie if someone was born in December they may have been registered in January the following year), tick off the sheet as you search, expanding outwards as you go like in our example if you cannot find any likely entries in 1906 then try 1905 and 1907 etc. The same applies if you are searching for a Marriage or Death.
- Birth certificates mainly give you the Fathers name and the Mothers MAIDEN name (to then look for a Marriage) and an address to look up on a census if the date is dated around 1891 or earlier.
- Marriage certificates mainly give you the Grooms name, the Brides MAIDEN name, where they lived, their ages (although this may say "full" - they were over 21), and the Fathers names of both Bride & Groom and their Occupations, and the names of the Witnesses (sometimes other relations).
- Death certificates mainly give you the name of the Deceased, what they died of, name of the informant (usually a relation), the appropriate addresses, the age of the Deceased when they died and sometimes their date of Birth!
Censuses
If you know of any of your ancestors that were around before April 1891 and you knew roughly whereabouts they lived then you may find them on a census, these are a great source of information.
Censuses were taken every 10 years starting from 1801 onwards for Goverment statistics but the ones useful to genealogists are the 1841, 1851, 1861, 1871, 1881, and 1891 census's (there is a Privacy 100 year Goverment rule so we can only look at the 1901 census from 1st January 2002). These censuses can be found as above in Libraries, Record Offices etc and some have been indexed (see our Publications Page for our covered areas) and they contain details of Families where they lived - the 1841 one contains their names, ages (over 16 they're rounded down to multiples of 5, ie if someone was 28 they're shown as 25 years old), marital status, Occupation and if they were born in the County or not. 1851 onwards they also show their relationships to the head of the household, where they were born and the County, and their ages are not rounded down anymore.
So using the Census sheet you can copy the relevant information off the census entry you find, and add to your information.
Parish Records
These are mainly Baptisms, Marriage and Burial record entries which can go back to the 1600's in some cases, and are mostly held at your local County Record Offices (the Lancashire Records Office at Bow Lane, Preston for our area) or may still be at the Church if they are fairly recent. So if you know where someone was born, married or passed away, find out the Churches for that area, find out where the Parish records are held and the dates covered, look up the relevant records there and using the Parish Record sheet note down the relevant information.
Well that should be enough to get you started. Next you should start to read some books on researching your Family Tree/History and there are numerous booklets specialising on particular topics like Parish Records, Wills (another good source), St Catherines index etc, maybe join a Local Family History Society (like ourselves!) or one that is for the area that your ancestors came from, and seek advice from other genealogists who should be only too happy to help you - after all we all started this sometime ourselves!
GOOD HUNTING!