As the song goes, you begin at the beginning….and that is with your parents. Names, birth dates, birth places, date and place of marriage, and – if they moved from one country to another – dates and modes of emigration.
This is probably fairly straightforward, if your parents are alive – ask them for that information. Ask them who their parents were. And ask if anyone in the family has created a family tree.
But it is not always so simple. Often people only become interested in researching their family’s history when they become older, like me. Your parents may not know much about their ancestry, for a variety of reasons, or they may be reluctant to talk about earlier history of the family. Your parents may have died before you became interested in asking these questions.
So what do you do if you can’t ask your parents, or if they don’t want to talk about their parents? You can start with your own birth certificate, which will name your parents. If you were born in the community where you still live, getting your birth certificate should be quite easy. If you were born somewhere else – in another country, for example – you may have to begin by ordering a copy of your birth certificate.
Once you have the certificate, which names your parents, you can look for their marriage, and that record should give you the names of your grandparents. Then you can work backwards from there.
Suppose you were born in England. A great free resource called FreeBMD will let you find the information you will need to order your birth certificate (if you were born before 1983). Using this information – name, registration year and quarter, registration district, county, volume and page – you will be able to order your certificate online through the General Register Office.
After 1911, birth certificates include the mother’s maiden name, so it should be fairly straightforward for you to find your parents’ marriage in FreeBMD. Once you work your way back to 1911, you should be able to find your ancestors in the census records, which you can access for free at FamilySearch. (See the list here.)
You could, of course, hire a genealogical researcher to do the research for you. There are people and agencies who do this for a fee. But for many people, the joy is in doing the research themselves – and this is made much easier by the efforts of thousands and thousands of volunteers who index records, host message boards, or help others solve their mysteries.
Who are my people? 