Free Family History Mini-Class 2024: Lesson 7

 

General Register House, Edinburgh
Image courtesy of National Records of Scotland

Some of the first and most important genealogical sources you will use in tracing your family tree are birth, marriage, death (BMD), and census records.  You can search many of these online at no cost using websites compiled by various organisations, often by volunteers. 

If you’re starting out in the British Isles, try using Free UK Genealogy or UK BMD for indexes to England & Wales civil registration, British census returns and parish records. Note that UK BMD provides more than one source for the England & Wales BMDs; their main web page explains this in more detail.

For birth, marriage and death records, both civil and religious, on the island of Ireland, you can search indexes and see free certificate images at Irish Genealogy.ie.  Some great tips on browsing these images are found on Shane Wilson’s blog. 

For many other countries as well as the UK and Ireland, record images (both indexed and unindexed) are freely accessible on FamilySearch.  You can search or browse civil registration/vital and census records, and tips and how-to videos are provided for using them.  Creating a FamilySearch account is free and allows you unlimited access to all the website's resources - see my previous post for some more things you can do on FamilySearch.

If you want to use the resources of a company that are kept behind a paywall, but don't want to shell out for a subscription, watch out for limited free access offers throughout the year - for example, websites like MyHeritage, FindMyPast, and Ancestry may make military records freely available around commemoration dates such as Remembrance Sunday, or Irish records near St. Patrick's Day.

Finally, if you’re trying to calculate someone’s birth date using their age on a census, here’s a handy chart to pinpoint the various dates on which censuses took place in the UK, Ireland, and the US.  This chart was compiled before the 1921 UK census was released for public use, so for that year, the date was Sunday 19th June. Of course, this is only helpful if your ancestors gave accurate ages to the census authorities!

 

In the next class, we'll look at some of the many digital resources available to help you learn more about your ancestors.