Tracing Your Family Tree
Information supplied by Howard James, Kielder Park Ouston.
The best way of tracing your family tree is to work
backwards, and use each certificate you obtain, as a stepping stone (a birth certificate and marriage certificate
will give the parents' names). A local archive will hold the Births, Marriages and Death Certificate Index on microfilm,
and you can go through this and search out your ancestors, then order the relevant certificate from the Family
Records Centre, in Southport (Tel: 0151471-4816).
The cost for each certificate is about £8.00. You can ask them to search for you at an extra charge of about
£3.00; but you have to give them a six-year consecutive range. and it takes about 9 weeks for them to process.
So, it's a lot quicker if you do the research yourself and give Southport the district, volume number, page number
and year. The certificates system was only introduced in 1837, so eventually you have to switch to parish records
(possibly held at the same archive). A really excellent aid is the 1881 British Census, which is now on computer
CD's and only costs £29.90 for the set which covers the whole country. It gives people's age and birthplace,
their address in 1881, other members of their family, and sometimes their occupation; all of which are invaluable
to genealogy research, and I think it is more useful than the various internet websites. You can order it over
the telephone at 0121-785-2200.
If you are interested in researching your ancestors through the internet. The Mormon's have a website (www.familysearch.org),
with 300 million names worldwide, and there is also another American site (www.ancestry.com). But the problem with
these sites is that the Mormon one tends to be patchy in the UK, as many parishes have refused to hand over their
records to them. And the ancestry.com site has many areas to it, where you have to sign up and pay in order to
gain access to these areas.
