We will start by asking you what you already know about your family. We will then start looking for written records of births, marriages and deaths. From there we will expand the search to include census records which show where people lived, their age, place of birth, marital status, family members, occupation and sometimes other details. Church records are another very valuable source of information about births, marriages and deaths.
We cross-check all of the details from different records to make sure we have found the correct individuals. The fact that someone has the right name and right age or even the right place of birth or family members does not necessarily mean they are the individual we are looking for. Other family trees on-line can be a useful source of information for more recent ancestors (and sometimes have photos of your ancestors), but they have to be treated with great care because they can often be wrong.
It may sometimes be necessary to buy a copy of a document, especially a birth registration document, to verify the parents’ names and other details. Increasingly these documents are available on-line, for example from the General Register Office (GRO) website for England and Wales, or the Scotlands People website, and can be downloaded instantly in electronic form for a small fee (£3.00 in the case of GRO records).
Other records that can prove useful include military records, electoral registers, city/county/trade directories, the Index of Wills, records of school, hospital and workhouse admissions, poor law records, social security records, and even criminal records.
What will you receive?
Using all the information we have found, we will identify as many of your direct ancestors as we are able, based on the written records, going back to at least your 16 great-great-grandparents, and usually many of your 32 great-great-great-grandparents. We will enter the information on a family tree we create for you on the Ancestry website. Records in the UK are extremely good going back to the late 1830s – the combination of civil, church and census records, supplemented by other records, provide a very powerful tool for research. This of course is subject to individuals having declared the (correct) parentage of their children. In more than a few cases birth records do not reveal the name of the father and the only sure way to research this is through a DNA test.
We will provide you with everything we have found. Firstly, for all of your direct ancestors that we have located, we will show their names, years of birth, marriage and death as well as the locations of those events. This will be in the form of a family tree produced in a pdf file taken summarising from the family tree we have created for you on the Ancestry website. Secondly, we will give you access to your family tree on the Ancestry website where you can view all the records we have found and have attached to the individuals in your family tree. It will also show any siblings for many of your ancestors from which it can be possible to identify more distant cousins. Ancestry gives free access to all records for a 14-day trial period, or you can choose to take out an Ancestry subscription if you want to research and grow your family tree further. But beware, it can be a bit addictive!