Chris Paton
ADVANCED RECORDS
When building our family trees as beginners we can make a vast amount of progress using resources such as basic birth, marriage and death records, censuses and newspapers. Nevertheless, even with such material, we will eventually come to brick walls on each of the ancestral lines that we are pursuing.
In trying to move from these basics of family history research to more advanced resources, we need to understand precisely why we have become stuck in our research in the first place. We need to learn, for instance, what the failings are in the most common collections that we have already considered.
In some cases, our inability to find an ancestor in the records will be simply because of the online presentation. This might be: an incomplete digitisation of a collection; an impression that a record set available online is the only relevant resource; a bad index transcription or perhaps a genuine reason that led to the event not being registered in the first place. A good example of this last circumstance is the Stamp Duties Act of 1783, by which the State imposed a fee of three pence to register baptisms, marriages and burials. Many people felt that they had a better use for their thruppence, and simply did not bother to register such events between 1783 and 1794, when the Act was finally repealed.
However, it is also the case that as beginners, our own ignorance of our ancestral world may be a problem. Many groups recorded vital events in a diverse society, probate research may not be quite as straightforward as you think, and records that you may never have heard of might hold the very answer that you are seeking. In this article I will provide a flavour of some of the areas where there is a bit more to get to grips with in understanding the ancestral world, and provide examples of material available online that might well come to your rescue.
Let’s begin at the beginning
To kick things off, let’s start with the vital records covering birth, marriage and death.