I am sure you will agree that the history of your family is straightforward in as much as your parents had parents, and their parents had parents, taking you back to the beginning of time, or at least until we were humanised, or not as the case might be. But locating historical information about your forebears might prove a little more difficult in reality.

If you have read my first book, you will understand exactly what I mean if embarking on this journey as a complete novice. But with the benefit of hindsight I can now show you how to create your first pedigree chart following a logical process using only the resources of the Internet and working more efficiently and productively than I did in my earlier research.

For the benefit of this exercise I am going to start from scratch, as if just beginning my research, and trace the pedigree of my father-in-law, Albert William Marelli, the inspiration behind my first book, using only the resources of the Internet. At his death we inherited various documents containing family information, including Bert’s (Albert William) birth certificate.

Step 1 – Acquire A Birth Certificate Of A Parent Or Grandparent

At this stage I can choose my next step. I could estimate the ages of both of Albert’s parents and start a search for their birth certificates or I could estimate the year of his parents’ marriage based on the birth date of Albert Marelli.

• To estimate a birth, remember that either parent could be as young as 18 or younger and as old as 40 years of age or older when Albert was born, giving me a search period of 22 years or more, i.e. the years from 1875 to 1897. I personally would assume they married young and choose 1897 to begin my search and work backwards.
• To estimate this second marriage, I would start at the date of their first child born in 1915 and work backwards.

 

I have chosen to find the marriage certificate of Albert and Lilian next as the information on this document will give me further clues to finding their individual birth certificates as I will show you.

• Remember that BMD registers are split into four quarters per year, March, June, September and December, and the registers began in the September quarter of 1837.

 

As Bert was born in November 1915, I am going to start searching from this year as they could quite easily have married shortly before his birth. But don’t forget they could also have married later.

Birth Certificate For Albert William Marelli

What information does a birth certificate give us?

But what else should we pay attention to on birth certificates?

Birth Certificates In More Detail

The top of the birth certificate gives the district name and this information is important when searching indexes. It is important to remember that boundaries were constantly changing, including not only counties but parishes. For instance, I knew that an ancestor died in Brixton but the registration district in the indexes is Lambeth. Also villages in rural areas such as Devon could share the registration district of the nearest large town, even though situated some distance away. This can be very misleading and it is always worth looking up registration districts in Genuki ( http://www.fhsc.org.uk/genuki/reg/ ).

Details of contents on Genuki

First Column On Your Birth Certificate Is The Gro Reference

Numbered 1 to 500 the GRO reference is for a complete page in a register. Twins on the same page will have the same reference number, but if the twins were the last entry on one page and the first on the next they will have consecutive reference numbers. Another point to remember is that some families may have two births that appear as if they are twins when in fact they could be cousins or not even related.