In any genealogical research, we ALWAYS start with what we already know and work backwards. So the first step in tracing your family tree is to make some notes on everything that you already know.
That means writing down all you know about your immediate family – names, dates and places of birth, marriage and deaths. Once you’ve exhausted your own knowledge, start asking members of your family, particularly elderly relatives such as your parents and aunts. If your grandparents are still alive, they may have lots of information about their own grandparents, which will take you back several generations already!
Elderly relatives love to talk about the past – but do be careful about the information they give you. Memory can play tricks and all information needs to be backed up by evidence, which you can research later. For now, you are gathering leads – clues and stories about your family that you can start to piece together like a jigsaw.
Another first step will be to find out if there are any photographs of your ancestors that might be held by members of your family. Photography became popular from the 1840s. If you are lucky enough to find these, they are a fascinating resource. There is nothing like the thrill of looking into the eyes of a great-grandparent for the first time and seeing your own eyes looking back!
This happened to me the first time I saw this photograph of my maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Reid, taken when she was a very young woman in about 1910!
Wedding photographs are particularly interesting because they usually show lots of family members and can give clues to members of your family that you did not know about.
Often the main drawback of photographs is that there is no information given. If you are very lucky someone may have written something on the back, but this is quite rare, so they can be quiet frustrating, while fascinating at the same time. Dating a photograph can also be tricky unless you know a lot about fashions of the time. There are plenty of books on the history of fashion, which can help, and there may be other clues in the photograph that you could research, such as buildings. I have also given a list of books below that can be ordered from Amazon.co.uk.
Once you have some initial information, and have found some photographs, you will be even more hungry to find more information about these people. Your next step is to use Civil Registration indexes to find birth, marriage and death certificates. You will find more information about these on this website.
Ros Bott
Dating Old Photographs (Genealogy)
Dating Old Photographs 1840-1929
A guide to dating old family photographs
Fashion: A History from the 18th to the 20th Century (Taschen 25th Anniversary)
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