So you want to find out about your Worcester family history? Here's how

Our own expert, local family historian Chris Sutton has put together a guide to help you in the right direction. For those already doing their ‘tree’ there will be some things you might not have thought of or be aware of. Here, he outlines the first steps to take

WHERE TO START

If you are happy to use the internet you can easily find and download family history charts and tree makers.

Joining Ancestry will give you immediate access to a tree maker as well as their genealogy resources. But if you want to get started quickly, and see exactly what you know and don’t know about your family, all you need is a pen and paper.

Write your name in a box on the middle top of the paper with your date of birth, and marriage if you got married.

You can make another box next to yours for your partner, and draw a line connecting the two. Now underneath your box we need two more boxes – one for your father and one for your mother – in your mother’s case remember to put in her maiden name.

Fill in all the details as you did for yours and add date of death if applicable. Connect your parents’ boxes together with a line and also put a line connecting you down to them.

Every generation down is doubling, so next you are looking to add four people – your grandparents. We need two boxes under your father and two under your mother for them.

Fill in all you know, as you did before and connect the boxes together for the two married couples and then link each couple up to either your father or mother.

The next step is the last one for this exercise – adding your great-grandparents. For many people this is the generation where they will get stuck, not many will know all eight names required for this generation.

Underneath each of your grandparents boxes we need two more boxes, so we are increasing from four boxes to eight, one for each of your grandparents’ parents.

Fill in the details as before and link them together with lines showing the connections. You may well already have gaps in your knowledge at this stage. The next stage would be to put in your great great-grandparents – 16 people and by all means give it a try – but for most of us those names would be unknown.

The next crucial step is to get hold of as many of the older members of your family as you can.

Talk to them and get their memories, even record them if you can. Ask them what they know about the family and ask them what they have got in terms of records and would they allow you to copy them?

The kind of things we are looking for are certificates (birth, marriage, death, baptism), photographs (remember to ask who is on them), family Bibles, passports (a great source if kept because of the official stamps), identity cards (such as from the Second World War, letters, postcards, diaries, wills, school certificates, newspaper articles, ration books, memorial cards and medals.

We will come back to all these later in the series but for now please get in touch if you have medal queries. All service medals (war, fire,ambulance etc) have value and are increasing. Everyone who served in the wars was awarded at least one medal.

BIRTHS, MARRIAGES AND DEATHS

Civil Registration began on July 1 1837, covering births, marriages and deaths. Prior to this date, from 1538, the church had kept records of baptisms, marriages and burials, which it continues to do to this day. The crucial change in 1837 was the state taking authority and the key new concepts of the importance of the date of birth and date of death of an individual.

BIRTH CERTIFICATES

Let’s start at the beginning then. These give you the date and place of birth, the child’s name and sex, the mother’s name and maiden name, the father’s name and occupation, the informant of the birth and the date when registered.

If a time is shown next to the birth then that usually means there was a multiple birth. The further back you go in time the birth is more often informed by the mother, because the father would find it difficult to take time off from work.

If there is a long delay between the date of birth and the registration of it, this can be an indicator that the birth was a difficult one.

The birth entry for John Sutton, the great-great-uncle of Chris Sutton

The mother’s maiden name shown here will help you look for the marriage of the child’s parents. In our example we have the birth entry for my great-great-uncle John Sutton. He was born on March 18 1895 at 10 Heath Place, Osler Street in Ladywood, Birmingham.

We can see that his mother, Rose Hannah, has the maiden name Webb and that his father, John Sutton, was a house painter. We now know to look for a Sutton/ Webb marriage in the marriage registration records.

If there had been no father’s name recorded then this would indicate an illegitimate birth. Sadly that was the protocol of the time and is something that most family historians will find on their tree. Tracking a father down in this instance is not easy but it can be done to varying degrees of certainty.

Incidentally, if you or someone on your tree was adopted, this involves research that can be more problematic but not impossible. We will come back to that later too.

Incredibly the General Register Office did not make registration of births compulsory until 1874.

This can explain why you cannot find an ancestor’s birth registered, because some did not bother to register a birth until the law was amended. Because the church still diligently carried on baptisms, and the public still supported that, you might be able to at least find your ancestor in those records.

Next time we will look at marriage and death certificates and tell you where to look for registration details which can help you to order copy certificates.