RECORDS MASTERCLASS
Learning about THE RECORDS
Chris Paton presents a records masterclass, with a step-by-step guide to assessing which records might give you the information you’re searching for, where these records might be found, and what to do if you can’t locate the information you need
Chris Paton
There are many factors that can affect how family history research might be carried out, but the greatest enemies that most of us will face within our ancestral pursuits are ignorance and prejudices about the collections we seek to use. One of the most useful skills that we can acquire as aspiring historians is to determine when such obstacles are real, and when they are blockages that we may have placed in the way ourselves, subconsciously, inadvertently, and at times because we simply do not fully understand the records that we are examining.
So many records have been digitised and placed online now that we can be easily seduced into the habit of simply looking for hits on a database, and then conclude that if the information we seek is not found then it must not have been recorded. Alternatively, if we do locate something, we may be seduced into thinking that this is all that there is to be found. This may or may not be the case, but simply trusting that the companies hosting the records have placed everything online concerning a particular topic is a very bad habit to get into. Similarly, for records that are held in archives and libraries which have not been digitised, it can be a folly to trust that an institution holds all the records from a particular source, when there may be other repositories holding additional materials.
Exploring the vital records
Perhaps the most important records that we use to construct our ancestors’ relationships to one another are the vital records of births, marriages, and deaths. In the UK and Ireland we can broadly divide these collections into two categories, being the more recent records of civil registration as gathered by the state from the mid-19th century, and then the earlier records that have been gathered by churches. Consideration of how such records are recorded, and where they fit into the grander scheme of things, can often affect our research approach.
What is the collection I’m looking at?
In carrying out a search in any collection we need to first interrogate what it is, understand what it holds, and equally importantly, what it does not. For example, is the record that we are looking at a first-hand account of the event we are interested in? Most census records that we use, for example, are not ‘primary’ records – they are ‘secondary’ copies made by enumerators from original schedules filled in by heads of households, which in most cases have been subsequently destroyed. The very act of copying a source can introduce errors into the quality of the record we are using, or deliberate changes to cater for statistical categories of information, such as occupations.