Building your Family Tree

Growing Your Tree

The most popular method of building your family tree is using one of several Family History websites designed for this purpose.  As well as showing your family members in a kind of organisational chart it will also provide hints to possible matches to your family line. 

Family Tree Websites

Although many family tree-building websites such as Ancestry require a subscription, there are similar resources for which there is no charge. Familysearch.org is the most comprehensive Family Tree-making software that I have come across and one of the first I ever used. I have listed the most popular ones here.

If you decide not to use one of the above, then you can also access the information they provide by using one of the many volunteer-run transcription websites. These include baptisms, marriages and deaths transcribed from church records by dedicated teams of volunteers and a good number of census records are available at no cost.

The key subjects to look for are:

The free-to-use websites I use a lot are as follows:

  • Familysearch.org
  • Free UK Genealogy
    • FreeBMD (Births, Marriages and Deaths)
    • FreeCEN (UK Census Returns)
    • FreeREG (registers of baptisms, marriages and burials of the Church of England and other organisations.)

Birth certificates usually show:

  • Date and place of birth
  • Name and gender
  • Names of parents (including mother’s maiden name)
  • Father’s occupation
  • Name, description and address of the informant
  • Date of registration

Marriage certificates usually show:

  • Date and place of marriage
  • Forenames and surnames of bride and groom
  • Ages of bride and groom (‘full age’ means 21 or over)
  • Abode of bride and groom
  • Father’s name and occupation for both bride and groom
  • Names of witnesses

Death certificates usually show:

  •  Date and place of death
  • Full name
  • Age at death
  • Occupation
  • Cause of death
  • Name, description and address of the informant
  • Date of registration
Building Your Family Tree

Growing your Family Tree

Even if you are going down the route of recording your family history online, and even if you are backing everything up using a Gedcom file, I feel it is also important to keep some sort of written record. 

I find it a lot easier to look at a handwritten summary of my findings to get a bigger picture.