Kelly McFarland
I recently started researching my family tree and it’s fascinating. I signed up for Ancestry, one of the leading websites where you can research back years and years of history in your family. Ask anyone that knows me I’m quite good at finding out info that nobody else knows. So this was right up my street.
I’ve started with my dad’s side.
And I found out my paternal Grandfather was one of a really large family. And that his oldest sibling, Emily (My dad’s aunt) moved to Australia and only passed away this year at the age of 103. She outlived most of her siblings. It’s fascinating to me but also really sad as I never met her or knew her as my Grandfather died when I was four years old.
The whole concept of researching your family tree is exciting and so much fun. I’ve spent hours on Ancestry researching right back to the 1600’s so far.
It’s also really easy to do.
All you need to do is sign up for a site like Ancestry and put in your date of birth or your parents and it will generate possible leads for you to look at, things like birth, marriage and census records. You can really look into what your family members did as jobs and where they lived.
Most of my dad’s side all came from huge families upwards of 14-15 children. Which as an only child is a tad daunting. My dad himself was one of 8 so I have loads of cousins.
I plan to start doing my Mum’s side as well in the future.
Starting to research my family tree was a bit like Alice in Wonderland and falling down the Rabbit hole and wondering just how deep the rabbit hole really goes.
Some things I have found really helpful when starting out is:
- Speak to your family, get names of your ancestors and relationships and date of births if you can. As it really helps with the search.
- Do it methodically. Start with people you know. It’s much easier to start by tracing people you know than others that you don’t really know much about.
- Makes notes as you go as you never know when a name or date of birth could come in handy.
- Your family history will be drawn from records and sources throughout history in which your ancestors will be mentioned. Birth, marriage, and death records, census 1841-1911, wills, church record, occupational records, education, and apprenticeship, military service records, tax records, criminal records, poor law, newspapers, trade directories, church records, court records, tombstones etc might all throw up valuable information.
If you like detective stories and love mind for solving puzzles then it’s definitely the hobby for you.
You can join Ancestry here.
Let us know at @Fuzzable if you have ever tried to research your family tree.
