HOW do you get started with researching your ancestry?
For most of us, the answer lies with our parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, or other immediate relatives. There are exceptions, of course, but most of us know the names of our parents and their places of birth and if they are not still alive to take the family tree back another generation, there will usually be other relatives who can help.
Build up as detailed a picture of your own generation – brothers, sisters, and first cousins – and earlier generations as you can. Family photograph albums will help, as will address books, birthday books and other family records. Even if relatives are not prepared to hand over old family photographs, they can be copied.
Make sure that names of people are written on the back of all photographs, because after the owner or current custodian’s death it may be very difficult, if not impossible, to identify important parts of the family jigsaw.
Talk to your oldest living relatives and ask them to recall details of their contemporaries who are no longer alive and their ancestors. Don’t make the conversation too formal, with a family tree in front of you to have names appended as you talk, but do take notes.
Every snippet of information helps. Granny may remember her great-uncle Fred without being able to give you any more detail. The passing comment that ‘uncle Arthur’ was 17 when he joined up at the start of the Great War immediately gives his date of birth as about 1897, which could prove invaluable when you start searching other sources.
Beware of uncles and aunts who were nothing of the sort. A close family friend adopted by your great-grandparents may have been known to younger members of the family as ‘auntie’, without being related at all.
Try to identify the exact relationship between known relatives and their cousins: first cousins share one set of grandparents; second cousins have the same great-grandparents; and children of first cousins are first cousins once removed.
This can get confusing, so it is time to get you hands on a computer programme to store your family tree, calculate these relationships for you and take out much of the hard work. The best will go off searching the internet for relatives and ancestors for you, once you have input basic data.
A package costing under £50 should be found on the shelves of your local computer software shop and excellent free packages can be found to download from the internet.
If you don’t have computer access at home, then you are going to have to resort to the old-fashioned exercise book, but however you keep records, bear in mind one golden rule: from day one of your research, write down or enter everything you discover about your family, and use the comment, source or notes feature of the computer programme to indicate where you discovered the information.
Now you are ready to go exploring public records to find more members of your family. You may want to start by confirming some of the relationships you have already discovered in the births, marriages and deaths records at the Office of the Superintendent Registrar in the Royal Square.
All these records since central registration first started in 1841 are held there and the staff will help you locate the records you need in indexes and bring them out for you.
Your first target, if it has not already been achieved with family help, is to identify ancestors who were alive in 1901, because that is the date of the first census, full details of which have been released to the public.
The first full census in the British Isles, including the Channel Islands, was in 1841, and they were held every ten years after that. The last to be released in full, 100 years after it was held, was that for 1901.
However, pressure in the UK under the Freedom of Information Act has led to an early release of parts of the 1911 census, before the 100-year embargo has expired. Unfortunately, the Channel Island section of that census is not expected to become available until later this year at the earliest.
Unfortunately, you cannot just go and look up census records in the Island. There are various incomplete sets available from all sorts of sources, some local, but if your family history research is serious, this is the time to get out your credit card and subscribe to the renowned internet genealogy service Ancestry.
An annual subscription to www.ancestry.co.uk will set you back over £80, but it will provide access to all manner of records, including a fully indexed set of all the Jersey censuses. You can try it for free before committing yourself to a subscription.
By entering the name of an ancestor into the census search facility you can, surprisingly rapidly: identify where they were living at the time of one or more of the censuses; who they were living with; what jobs members of the household had; and much more absolutely fascinating information.
You can quickly build up a picture of your family stretching back to the middle of the 18th century, providing you can identify individuals who were alive in 1841.
The next step is back to the Superintendent Registrar’s office to use birth, marriage and death records to gather further information about all those who were living in the past 68 years. But it doesn’t stop there, because you can access indexes for the church records of baptisms, marriages and burials (note the subtle but important difference from the more recent central records) going back to the 16th and 17th centuries.
Copies of these indexes, painstakingly researched and transcribed some years ago by members of the Channel Island Family History Society, are held by the Superintendent Registrar, at the library of La Société Jersiaise in the museum, and at the Jersey Archive.
It is a time-consuming, but nevertheless highly rewarding exercise to work your way back through these parish records, identifying your ancestors.
You may spend many hours determining which of the two John Smiths (or more likely Jean Le Bretons, de Carterets, de Ste Croix, etc) born in 1709 was a great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather (genealogists write this as 7 x great-grandfather to save space), but the more research you do, the easier it usually becomes.
You will frequently hit what genealogists call brick walls, but you will also find that by using the internet you can tap into research already carried out by distant or not-so-distant relatives, filling in whole chunks of your family tree at a stroke.
Unfortunately, some family history research brick walls will never be demolished. Take, for example, my father’s mother’s mother, otherwise known as my great-grandmother Catherine May.
So she is shown on the certificate of her December 1873 marriage to Jean Monet Le Cras, with her father’s name given as Charles May. But search the censuses of 1851 and 1861 and you will find, as I did, that no such Catherine and Charles May were resident either in Jersey or anywhere else in the British Isles.
The answer to this conundrum was provided for me by Jack Worrall, a volunteer family history researcher for La Société Jersiaise, who was helping me research my family.
It just happened that not long before he had been chronicling records of births registered by the General Hospital and came across Catherine’s birth record, which was registered by the hospital chaplain with the note ‘trouvée `a la porte d’une maison située dans la rue dite Vauxhall – le 8/5/1854.’.
Great-grandmother Catherine was found abandoned as a baby on a doorstep in Vauxhall Street and taken to the hospital, where she was given the names Catherine de Mai, the latter relating to the month of her discovery.
I have been unable to unearth any information about how Catherine was brought up, but she later anglicised her surname to May and invented a father for her marriage certificate. Whether my grandmother ever knew the truth about her mother’s birth I know not, but I am pretty certain that my father never did.
Family records, such as albums and the various censuses, are essential tools for those intent on preparing a family history
