The Genealogist Research Guide

Where Do I Start?

When you first begin your research, you need to talk to any living relatives and try to get as much information from them as possible.  Make notes and try to draw out a basic tree with your own knowledge and the information provided by them.  Then you're ready to start filling in the gaps and work your way back through your tree.

The Genealogist offers core sources essential to every family historian. Key records include the census for England and Wales (1841-1901) and the civil registration indexes of births, marriages and deaths (BMD) 1837-2005.

Search Tools Available on TheGenealogist

What's particularly different about TheGenealogist.co.uk (TheGenealogist) is the range of powerful tools available for locating your ancestors. Once you have logged in from the home page, you will find the four kinds of search facilities at the top of the 'Research View': the Keyword Master, Classic Master, Family Forename and House and Street search.

If you are not entirely sure where your ancestor was in the census, try using either the Keyword or Classic Name Master search. 

The Keyword Master search can be used to do a quick search across all census transcripts, and also any other transcripts that we have available, such as Parish Records.  This can also be used to search the Birth, Marriage & Death index from 1984 to 2005, but not before, as the index is in original image format prior to 1983.

Enter any details you know about a person: forename, surname, year of birth, place name, etc. (It works just like a web search-engine). It is recommended to use at least 2 keywords, e.g. “George Bayley Lydd Labourer” (name, place, occupation). Wildcards (*) can be used to represent any characters at the END of your SURNAME, FORENAME or AGE keywords only (e.g. JAM* will find JAMES, JAMIE; 178* will find 1780-1789, etc).

Try not to make the search too specific, as the age and birth place can sometimes differ between census years.  It may also be wise to omit any middle names/initials as these were not always included.

Example: Enter any known details into the search text box. For example, in the 1891 Census set, looking for Bessie Taylor born in Truro, Cornwall in 1870, try:

This search produces one result, and the terms entered into the text box have been highlighted in green to show a match. From this result we can see that Bessie was living in London, not in Cornwall as may have been expected.

Clicking on the available links enables the household to be viewed as a transcript and access to the original image, both of which open in a new window. Broadening the search to a different year can be easily done within the same window - just alter the Selected Year, and amend any details to fit the year.

Searching for Bessie Taylor Truro 1 gave no results, whereas removing the rather ambiguous forename Bessie gives 3 possible matches:

Our Classic Master Name searches across all Census, Births, Marriages & Deaths (1984-2005) and requires a name to begin the search. 

You will be shown the number of results available for each county and year.  Once you have selected which set of results you wish to view, you can enter age, occupation and birth county to narrow down the results:

If you are not having any luck with the Master searches, we also have the Family Forename search:

This is a great tool for extracting hard to find families in the census. This feature enables you to search for a family you have not been able to find using the surname; possibly due to an unexpected spelling variation, by using the forenames only as a group search.  The results can be refined by adding or subtracting a surname or family members. It's much faster than our advanced search and shows results across the full census years. 

As many families had a large number of children, the odds of another family in the same county being an exact match is quite remote. It is possible to narrow the search by year and county, if required, and enter up to 6 possible forenames that you would be expecting to find within a family group

The Year of Birth has also been included as an optional entry, which you can enter for any member of the group, or all of them, or none at all. There is the facility to then broaden the expected Year of Birth to include any matches within a decade by clicking the option box:

Results for this forename group show 3 possible matches within the selected year and county, and are displayed with the requested forenames highlighted, as well as any other names , and will include the Surname, and the Street Address, as well as a link to view the original images:

It is possible to include a surname during the forename search, or at least the first 3 letters followed by a wildcard symbol, such as Bra* if searching for Bransgrove, to reduce a search if there are many results.

The final option that can be selected if necessary is the 'Family Members Max Number Limit' which will only search for a family of below a specified number, and is set to 15 by default.

One of the advantages of the full transcription on TheGenealogist is that you can find the entry for a street address without having to know who lives there. Using House and Street Search, select the year, such as 1851, and the county, e.g. London:

Then enter the name of the street you are looking for.  If for example you wanted to find Oxford Street you could enter the full name, but the census may have recorded that as 'Street', 'St' or 'Str'. Since the search engine accepts the wildcard '*' symbol to represent one or more letters, a search on 'Oxford S*' will capture these variations.  In large cities, a street name may have been used more than once, so the area of each street is also listed.

From the list of results, select the address you were searching for.  The next window will show the result, and it is at this stage that you can specify a house number or name.  You can choose either to view the household or to view the original image by clicking the icons:

Searching Databases Individually

TheGenealogist has a large number of databases which can be searched individually.  If you scroll down the Research View page, past the search tools, you will find the list which gives you direct access to these. TheGenealogist has death records for both World Wars and there is an ongoing project to document overseas Birth, Marriage & Death records for members of the British Armed Forces. TheGenealogist is also adding transcripts or page images of parish records, marriage registers, non-conformist records, trade directories, school records, will indexes and other publications for various counties and era's, many of which cover periods before the census and civil registration and some are not available elsewhere.

If you want to see a complete of list of all datasets available, click on the link below:
http://www.TheGenealogist.co.uk/nameindex/ai_content.php

Birth, Marriage & Death Index

The first port of call for your research should be the Birth, Marriage and Death Indexes.

Using the information gleaned from your relatives you can search for births, marriages and deaths and order certificates of these events from the GRO (General Register Office).

The birth certificate will give you an exact date and place of birth, the father's name and occupation, and the mother's maiden name. The marriage certificate will give the date and place of the marriage, the forenames and surnames of the couple, and their ages (before 1855 it will only show either 'full' if over 21 or 'minor' if under). It also lists the residence and profession of the father plus the names of the marriage witnesses.

You can then use these facts to search the census. Search for the known family members and you will often find the whole family listed with their ages (using our family button). This information can be used to search for further births and marriages, so you can work your way back through the generations. The census will allow you to work back down the tree and help you to find any living relatives.

On your Research View page, click on the drop-down box under 'Birth, Marriage and Death Indexes' then select the records that you wish to search.  For the standard Index choose 'BMD Indexes 1837-2005'. 

Once highlighted, click to search and you will be taken to the next page, which asks you which section of the Index you want to search.  The Index is divided into two sections: 1837-1983 and 1984-2005.  For records prior to 1984 the indexes were written or typed in alphabetic order for each quarter. These were then preserved on microfilm. The image of the original index page has been digitised and indexed where required by Surname, Forename and Initial of the first person on each page. This enables the system to search for a name and find the page which should contain that entry. It also allows you to browse back a page or forwards a page. 

To begin searching, enter your search terms and the year range (maximum 5 years). Then click on submit.

You'll then be shown a quarter for each year searched. To view the names on each page, click the names as indicated in the picture below.  This will open up the page in an Adobe Image Viewer.

About the Birth, Marriage & Death Index:

Civil Registration was introduced in 1837 to record Births, Marriages and Deaths, which previously hadn't been centrally registered. Like the census, its introduction had much to do with monitoring the growth and age profile of the country's population. (Previously, the only records were the parish records kept by the church.)

The General Registry Office was in charge of collecting and collating this data and they created quarterly indexes to Birth, Marriage and Death registrations. Registration certificates are a key resource in family history research. You cannot view the original register entries but you can purchase copies of the certificates. The GRO indexes are used to locate the references necessary to order certificates.

The GRO's indexes are sometimes still called the St. Catherine's Indexes, after the building they lived in for many years, and it's not so long ago that you would have to spend hours winding rolls of microfilm or navigating fiche, to search just a few years looking for a single entry.

Commencing with the introduction of Civil Registration in 1837 and running up to the present day, the indexes enable us to locate the dates of family events and purchase the certificates necessary to carry out our research. Now, the Birth, Marriage & Death indexes are fully searchable online and you can achieve in a day what may have taken you months or even years previously. Now that the GRO provide online certificate ordering, the whole process can be carried out quickly, without leaving your home. The only delay to your research is the few days waiting for the post to arrive.

Although the certificates themselves provide a wealth of knowledge, the indexes provide very little, just an Event, Name, Year, Quarter and Page number. You may also find the reported age at death, the surname of the spouse or a mother's maiden name on later entries. Records are a little patchy in the early years, especially if you are looking at births because initially registration was voluntary.

Some researchers are content with just finding the reference in the GRO indexes, recording the "My Ancestor" was born in the 3rd quarter of 1897, married the 1st quarter 1932 ..., etc. Purchasing certificates can be expensive if you buy them all, but although you may not wish to purchase them for every child, for example, you should purchase at least a representative sample for each family, as well as those purchased to try and solve particular problems.

Certificates contain a wealth of extra information related to each event. The index reference only provides an approximate date, and even with unusual names you can never be certain. For instance, birth certificates can show how a family moved around a town, possibly indicating the family's wealth and social status at the time. A marriage certificate can provide both spouse's father's names and occupations as well as the actual place and date of the marriage, plus their ages and addresses at the time of marriage.

For further information on certificates go to: http://www.BMDindex.co.uk/info.htm

The full reference necessary to purchase a certificate consists of the Registration District; Year; Quarter; Volume number and the Page number. These references apply only when you order certificates from the GRO. If you apply at the relevant local office, the registrar there will have a different system. They can make use of the year and quarter information you supply, but will have to look up the entry in their own index. You will also need to know the name of the church in the case of a marriage, as they tend to be kept separately. In a large town or city with many churches this can be a problem, which can be overcome by ordering the certificate direct from the GRO whose indexes are amalgamated.

The Birth, Marriage & Death index section of The Genealogist offers complete coverage of the full period of civil registration (1837-1983) using an indexed image service. The full content of the pages is not indexed. You have to view the digitised images of the original index pages and extract the information from those yourself.

To locate the correct page for you to search, the page images are indexed by the name range that each page contains. As the indexing doesn't indicate whether or not the name actually appears on that particular page, only that it falls within its name range, this means that you will generally have to view 4 pages, one per quarter, to search for a single event within a one year period. Make sure that you note all the details - Year; Quarter; District, Volume and Page so that you can order a certificate.

Early indexes contain just the name and reference, but extra information was later added to the indexes to help locate the correct individual. The Age at Death was included in the Death indexes from 1866 and from 1912 the surname of the spouse was added to the Marriages and the maiden name of the mother to Births.

From 1984 the General Register Office computerised their indexes, allowing them to be fully searchable for individual entries. We have indexed 1980 to 1983 marriages and added these to the available records for searching.

The Genealogist offers a Simple Search form, which allows you to search by a single forename and surname, or an Advanced Search in which a range of parameters can be included, such as initials, other forenames, mother's maiden name or spouse's surname. To find the full reference required to purchase a certificate, click the link next to the entry in the search results.

SmartSearch
BMDindex has utilised these fully searchable records to offer some innovative features, utilising the fact that the data can be easily interrogated in different ways. Several searches based on the results you have already located can be performed with just one click, for instance a reverse search on a marriage index entry can provide the first name for a spouse, not just the surname.

The SmartSearch also enables you to find all the children registered to the same parents, quickly finding all the family.

From the Age at Death it can automatically list the birth index pages likely to contain their birth. Of course this only works with entries for males or spinsters, and reported ages are often inaccurate, but the feature can save you time and effort.

Surname Mapping
Originally a feature of their online 2% 1851 census subscription, the Surname Distribution Mapping tool has also been applied to the Birth, Marriage & Death data. This enables you to map surname densities onto a county map of England and Wales, often with interesting results. This is colour coded, according to the numbers of events present, providing a visual display of surname registration densities across the counties for different periods in time. As well as the visual representation, a table provides an accurate count for each county.

Record certificates are not available to view online on any site, they are only available from the General Register Office.  Copies of Birth, Marriage or Death certificates for England or Wales can be ordered online direct from the GRO website: www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/certificate

Simply follow the instructions on the GRO website, providing the necessary information and the GRO Index reference you have found in the indexes. This is the year, quarter and district, usually accompanied by a volume number and page reference, but later records may simply have an Entry number. The GRO require you to supply more information in the application for births and marriages within the last 50 years.

Census Transcripts

The census is a statistical exercise undertaken to inform the government, counting and recording facts about the population. You could say that the first large scale census taken in modern history was Domesday and there have been others over the years, such as Muster rolls, taken to see what able-bodied men and weapons were available for war.

A census, as we understand it now has been carried out every decade since 1801. The only exception was 1941 when other things seemed more important. It is not intended for family historians to use, but as a government exercise in finding out statistics about the population, to enable them to make informed decisions on a wide variety of topics including housing, transport and food, and to identify the strengths and weaknesses in the economic structure of the country.

From 1801-1831, purely statistical data was collected with no usable genealogical material, however the 1841 census introduced records with some personal information for the first time. The usefulness of the 1841 census is limited to family historians because it didn't accurately record people's ages, or where they were born, only noting if they were born in the same county or not.

The amount of information collected was extended in 1851 and from 1851 to 1901 there are only minor changes to the information recorded on the census form. The principal information you can expect to find is:

• Address - Unfortunately not always very accurate, unless your ancestors lived in a named house or farm. You may have to settle for simply knowing the name of the road or the village.
• Name - The surname with at least one forename, although it could turn out to be a pet name, and sometimes you find second forenames or initials.
• Relationship - How the individual is related to the head of the household. Information providing the structure of the family, especially where married children or relations are included in the household.
• Condition - Whether married, widowed or single. Again useful in establishing family structure.
• Age -From 1851 onwards, these are usually as accurate as your ancestors were able or prepared to supply. In the 1841 census they are usually rounded to the nearest 5 years for adults.
• Occupation - The rank, profession or occupation can be useful in helping to establish that you have found the correct person, especially if they share a relatively common name.
• Where born - Another field that is useful in helping you identify individuals, although for a number of reasons it frequently contains mistakes.

Many people don't realise that the census page images we see are actually transcripts of the household census forms, the details being copied into the books by enumerators. This provides several opportunities for mistakes to occur, firstly as they tried to decipher the writing on the household forms, which were later destroyed. Illiterate or barely literate ancestors may not have understood the form or even known with any accuracy the answer to the questions. They may have been suspicious of this government prying into their affairs and been less than honest in their answers. Just as today, a certain percentage manage to avoid being included, either deliberately or accidentally. With the possibility of errors and misinformation creeping in from the very outset, you should always use your own judgment when assessing the information from the census. It may be completely accurate, but you will often find discrepancies.

Because of these problems, TheGenealogist has come up with some unique tools to help you find your relatives; such as the family forename search tool, which allows you to search for a group of people by forename only or the house & street search, allowing you to see exactly who is living at a particular address and the keyword master search, which allows you to search for a list of key words; such as name, year/place of birth, occupation and area, etc.

The biggest problem for the family historian is actually finding the entries they need amongst this vast collection of data. Unless your ancestors never moved more than a mile from their origins, some sort of finding aid is required.

At first the only help available was an index to places, to help you locate the relevant section to manually search page by page, and for larger towns and cities a street index. Family history societies then started to index their areas and make some name indexes available. These didn't make a very large impression though and most of the census remained unindexed until the joint project to transcribe and index the 1881 census took place and showed what could be done. The upsurge in the use of home computers and the internet have brought a complete new set of tools to the aid of the family historian, and an ever growing demand for more information to become accessible online.

British Data Archive have made the census page images available on CD, for everyone to use on their own home computers at any time. This itself was a great improvement, as only a couple of years ago you would probably have had to travel the country to get only a couple of hours access. Having produced the images for everyone to use, the next logical step was to provide those images with the indexing necessary to make them easy to use, and with this aim in mind, S&N set up The Genealogist indexing and transcription project

Each category listed offers a choice of records within that category and then opens a window with the applicable search fields for your chosen document.

The census window offers a basic search on name and age, with the option for phonetic variations and nicknames - a rather clever system that identifies variants of forenames, such as Betty, Betsy, Beth and Liz as being Elizabeth. Switch to Advanced Search and you have all these options plus the ability to specify data for all the fields in the census form, including street address and occupation.

If you select an individual census county from your Research View page, you will be taken to the search page as above.  On this page, you can specify a census year and do a standard search with name and age, and also include nickname and surname variant option.  If you wish to do an advanced search, click on the link and your page will change to that shown below.  This opens up options to include the district, occupation, relation to head, birth county and street address in your search.

Once you have submitted your search, the results will be listed below.  You can arrange your results according to your own preference, by using the arrows in each heading box. 

The icons on the right-hand side of each entry will allow you to open the original image, save the image, report a problem with the transcript/image, view all family members and view the entire household.

Household View example:

Census Image example:

 

Parish Records

Before the introduction of Civil Registration in 1837, the only records to the key events in people's lives were recorded in the registers of parish churches and some non-conformist places of worship. These are the records of Baptism, Marriage and Burial.

The earliest parish registers usually date to around the mid-16th Century, when Elizabeth I declared that accurate registers should be maintained. However, most only date from around 1600, after she had instructed that they should be preserved in bound books and not on any old scrap of writing material. Even after her efforts, many registers have been lost over the years and those surviving today are now usually safely deposited in the local record office, not the church they are associated with.

Parish registers can contain large gaps, such as for the Commonwealth period, which can leave the mid-1600s looking sparse. You also get volumes which have gone missing over the years leaving frustratingly large gaps. Small gaps are not as bad unless they happen to coincide with the event you are looking for. These are usually due to negligence, often occurring where the clerk didn't enter them at the time and forgot to do it later. If you are lucky, some of the larger gaps in Parish Records caused by lost volumes may be covered by the Bishop's or Archdeacon's Transcripts. These are copies of the events copied from the Parish registers which were sent to the Diocese each year. BT's may themselves be incomplete, especially at the beginning or end of the periods.

Unlike the Census or the Civil registration material, Parish Records are scattered all across the country, so it will be well into the future, if ever, that we will be able to search them online in the same way. Most churches have deposited records over 100 years old at their local record office, but some still retain burial registers for example, that were started in the last century and still are not full yet. Chapel records are not as well preserved, some are in private hands and many have been lost. However, there are many parish register transcripts published by various parish record societies, historical groups and individuals and these lend themselves to being made accessible online.

Most people are tracing a surname line, but the tradition of marrying in the bride's parish can make marriages before 1837 difficult to trace. When a man marries out of the parish there are often no clues as to where he went, thus requiring extensive searching of an ever widening circle of surrounding parishes in the hope of finding him.

You may strike it lucky if they were married by Banns and the Banns register still exists, though not many do. Early genealogists, for whom record access was more difficult than today, recognised the difficulties of tracing marriages and this led to several of them creating manuscript indexes. The best known are Boyd's and Pallot's, however Phillimore set about it in a different way, transcribing and publishing marriages from many churches. The parish records currently available on TheGenealogist are taken from various published transcripts, and include many from the Phillimore series of transcripts of marriage registers.

The Genealogist has now put online thousands of parishes. These have two main formats, database (Transcripts) and searchable book images (Printed Books).

The database records consist of easily searched transcripts of the original records which allow you to search them on various fields and may also have linked images of the original registers. This feature depends on the local archive giving permission to publish the images.

The searchable books consist of indexed books that were transcribed and published many years ago, many over 110 years old. These transcript books have then been OCR'd (Optical Character Recognition) to turn the pages into searchable text.

Directories

Directory Resources are both a research tool and a valuable insight into the lives of our ancestors and what governed their lives. Although not as detailed, the range of dates that directories cover is much greater than the census.

Pigot directories start around 1820 and cover the major professions, nobility, gentry, clergy, coach and carrier services, taverns and public houses of the areas. Entries include the name, trade and address. Slater directories tend to be larger than the Pigots and cover the 1850's in a similar manner.

Watkins directories of London are more comprehensive and show residents street by street giving more detail, such as occupations. Bulmer directories have a larger history section than others, normally before the directory information. Kelly's directories often show residents. There are sections on each major town and surrounding villages, with a history of the area in a great deal of detail as you would find in a gazetteer. Information on the main trades, the chief landowners, the type of soil and even the coverage dates of parish registers can also appear.

In the later Kelly directories, more detail is given on residents. These are sometimes put in a section called Court Directory. Finally, the Post Office Directories in the 1900's gave fairly complete listings for the residents and tradespeople of an area.

The Genealogist offers three different types of directory searching. The standard Directory search allows you to choose a region, e.g. 'Northern' and then select a directory from the list.  You can then browse through the entire directory, either page by page or jump to a specific section using the bookmarks. 

 

If you would rather search for a name directly rather than browse the images, you can change to the search tool using the 'Click to Search Link' above the list of available directories.  This then changes the screen format and gives you a search box to enter a name.

This can also be accessed directly from your Research View page by selecting 'Directories Search', where you will then be able to access directories for a specific county or click on the lower link to search across all counties.

We have also added the 'Directory Transcripts', which can be accessed via the Research View page.  The images have been transcribed, offering a much faster and more efficient search tool.