Start climbing your family tree
BY READERS DIGEST
1st Jan 2015 Life
Finding out about ancestors can be interesting and inspiring. Who knows what you will find at the top of your family tree?
WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? Has Made genealogy cool
Prior to the popular BBC TV series genealogy was often seen as a nerdy pursuit. Now we’re all at it, scanning the 1901 census and inmates of the prison hulks to find our forebears.
With luck, you can trace your line back to 1837, when official registration of births, marriages and deaths began. Before that, you’re reliant on parish records—if your ancestors moved or had a common name (John Smith is dispiriting) they can vanish.
What you need is a “gateway” ancestor, says Claire Vaughan, acting editor of Who Do You Think You Are? magazine. “If there’s an aristocrat in your family tree, you can zoom back easily,” she says.
Ancestor-hunter Phil Reid has gone back in time to Rollo the Viking (born 870) by finding a link to King John through a string of vicars based in the ancient village of Avebury, Wiltshire. While Claire explored tracing family myth, “There was a rumour that we were Spanish but it turned out that my ancestor was an Italian immigrant."
With a wealth of information now at your fingertips, it has never been easier to start tracing your family tree. It is not only interesting to find out the origins of your family history, but it serves as a great way to bond with your family members, reminiscing about reletives and discovering old stories.
How to find your ancestors
- Ask your oldest relatives to tell you all the things they remember about their grandparents.
- Trawl the archives. Best known are familysearch.org (free) and ancestry.co.uk (subscription), while censuses and military records can be accessed through the National Archives for a small fee.
- Use social networking websites to pool your findings with others researching your family.
- Look up long-dead relatives. From a First World War battlefield to a hill station in India, seeing where your family lived gives a real sense of your roots.