Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry And Family History
If you are Scottish by birth or descent, you have, no doubt, often wondered about your Scottish Ancestry and Family History. Now, thanks to easy access to a multitude of Scottish records including Statutory Registers, Old Parish Registers, Census Records as well as Coats of Arms Searches, you now have a great opportunity of discovering so much more about your Scottish Family History.
However, because there is so much information out there, you need to be able to sift through it quickly and this can only be done once you know what you want and how to find it. Therefore, your first order of business should be to find yourself a quick and informative resource guide that can help you better understand the process of tracing your Scottish family history. Fortunately, one of the best resource guides is my own book, ‘How To Track Down Your Ancestors’ which you can find on the home page of this website. Once you have read this guide, you’ll be in a better position to start doing your research – by narrowing down where to look and how to do it.
You will also want to find a resource guide that can handily tell you what NOT to do when tracing your family history – again you can download my free report ‘7 Simple Mistakes To Avoid When Researching and Writing Your Own Family History’ . This will save you an enormous amount of time – instead of you having to learn your lessons through trial and error. Let someone else, who has been there before you, guide the way.
Once you feel comfortable that you know what you are looking for and how to go about it, you should start with the main online Scottish genealogical information site that has been created by joining the records of the General Register Office for Scotland, the National Archives of Scotland and the Court of the Lord Lyon. This is www.Scotlandspeople.com. This database, which isn’t free unfortunately, gives you access to births and deaths as well as marriage information and also contains records on wills and testaments. There is a huge amount of information store here, so take advantage of it.
Of course, there are many more websites sites that you can consult when looking up your Scottish Family History. Just remember to prepare yourself thoroughly before starting your search and to make sure that you have a lot of patience during the process.
Tracing Your Welsh Ancestry And Family History
Finding out about your Welsh Ancestry and Family History can certainly be interesting but, at times, it can also be a frustrating exercise.
If you happen to be of Welsh descent, tracing your ancestors may pose a bit more of a challenge, thanks, in great part, to the fact that many people with the same surnames lived in that part of the world during the same time period. While this may be a bit daunting, it is not insurmountable. Making it a little easier will be the easy access to the varied amount of documentation available in many parts of Wales. Excellent civil records were kept in the 18th and 19th centuries, and these can be viewed at The National Library of Wales. There are also many older documents that have survived, dating from as early as the 1500s, thanks to the various churches of the time; these can also be viewed at the National Library and local Welsh County Record Offices.
If you are unsure where to start, then my book, ‘How To Track Down Your Ancestors’ will show you what Welsh Family History resources there are and where you can find them.
When it comes to Welsh Genealogy, a few things are worth mentioning:
* Remember there are differences between the English and Welsh alphabets
* “Mab” means “son of” and can also be seen as “Ab or Ap”;
* “Ferch” means “daughter of” and can also be seen as “Verch, Vch, Vz or Ach”
* Until 1812, Welsh surnames were ‘patronymic’ – the surname being derived from the father’s first name (e.g. John Edwards would be the son of a man whose first name was ‘Edward’)
Tracing your Welsh family tree can, indeed, be a huge undertaking, so remember that this project should be done with patience (lots of it!), love and dedication. You will not find all the answers you are looking for right away and you may feel baffled or hit the proverbial “brick wall”. Sit back and take a moment to regroup and then start again.
Indeed, tracking down your Welsh family history can be a lot easier for some people than others. I speak from personal experience! On my mother’s side, the first Welsh ancestor I found was Richard Davies – in 1851, he was living in Liverpool and the Census showed his birthplace in about1803 as ‘Kerry, Montgomeryshire’. The Baptism section of the Kerry Parish Register shows him born illegitimately in 1804 to ‘Elizabeth Davies or Edwards’, she in turn being the daughter of David Edwards and ‘Martha’, but there the trail runs cold, as the Mormon microfilm didn’t contain any Marriage records! So, I’m going to have to make a trip to Wales to find out more!
If you are feeling overwhelmed or unsure, there are a variety of “genealogy clubs” on the Internet – consider getting peer support. And don’t forget, that I can give you advice and guidance, so please read the ‘home’ page of this website.
Your First Family History Interview – How To Start It
Some people have written to me complaining, “it’s all very well you saying get hold of a relative and start your Family History interview, but I’ve never done anything like this before and I don’t know how to go about doing it”.
Well, there you are with your Uncle David. He’s agreed to tell you all he knows about his life and that of his family, he’s happy to let you record him, and now he’s ready to be interviewed about the Family Tree. (Please note that you should always get permission from your interviewees before using a recording device.)
This first Family History interview is always the worst – like most things, it gets better and easier the more you do. It doesn’t matter if you make mistakes, because it’s unlikely you’ll ‘publish’ the recording to the general public! Whatever you do with the recording – transcribing it into a book or making it available on a CD – it will most probably stay in the family.
But to make the interview go a lot smoother, make sure you have a list of Family History questions written down beforehand. That’s what journalists and TV Chat Show hosts do! And always make a note of when and where the interview takes place – as well identifying the relationship of your interviewee to yourself e.g. David who is my uncle, and who is my mother’s brother.
Noting the date of the interview is important as it will give you a reference point. So, if David, above, talks about something that happened 25 years ago, you can work back and establish when the incident took place.
Armed with you pre-written set of questions, just talk naturally to your Uncle David. He may ‘wander’ from the script, but that’s OK since he may tell you things you never thought of asking. There’s no need to insist on a ‘rigid’ approach to the interview – you don’t have to ask questions in the order you’ve written them down. All you have to do is to make sure that at some point you get answers to all your pre-written questions. Just be relaxed because the more relaxed the interview is, the more your Uncle David will ‘open up’.
Recording an interview is a lot easier than writing everything down at the time. However, individuals act differently when faced with recorder – some ‘clam up’, whilst others become very chatty. Whatever type of personality your interviewee is, turn off the recorder if you feel you are not getting the information you want. You always have your notebook to fall back on!
How Do You Start Writing Your Family History?
The most difficult step anyone takes in when they start doing anything is the first. And this most definitely applies to writing your own Family History. So, where do you start?
Well, the answer is ‘With You’. You have your own birth certificate and maybe a marriage certificate, (you won’t have your own death certificate!), and you know when your children, if you have any, were born. This information does not however comprise your own personal ‘Family History’ – it’s just a list of dates which gives the barest outline of your life.
To turn this genealogical information into a Family History, you need to ‘put flesh on the bones’. By this, I mean that you need to fill in the gaps between the basic dates you’ve already got. You should start writing down all the main details of your life – your memories of your early and late childhood, your schools, your college and where you worked. You should remember all the friends you had over the years, your recollections of your own family – parents, siblings, aunts and uncles. You should describe all the interests, hobbies and sports you enjoyed.
When you’ve done all of this, you’ve started to write your Family History. Next, do exactly the same for your parents. Get dates for their births, marriage (and deaths, if applicable). If they are still alive, talk to them about their lives and make a record of what they say – again, you can write it down or get it on audio or video.
Then repeat the process with your grandparents, and don’t forget to talk to other relatives – uncles, aunts, cousins and your own brothers and sisters. You’re great-grandparents are probably no longer alive, so make sure you get as much information about them from your own parents and grandparents.
When you go further back than your great-grandparents, it is doubtful whether you will have any personal reminiscences to draw upon, but you may have old letters and photographs. It is at this point that you’ll have to ‘change tack’ in compiling your Family History and start to investigate various ‘official’ documents in the public domain for personal details about your distant ancestors.
But for now, you’ve got enough exploring to do with your living relations to keep yourself busy for a while!
Is there any difference between ‘Genealogy’ and ‘Family History’?
The terms ‘Genealogy’ and ‘Family History’ are often used synonymously, and many people confuse the two, but for me there is an important difference between Genealogy and Family History.
‘Genealogy’ is simply the study of a person’s ancestry and descendents – it deals with discovering who members of a specific family are and how these family members are related to others. This was particularly important years ago to determine the relationships of the rich and powerful, because practical concerns about who inherited what from whom were at stake. If a King or Duke had no legitimate children, then it was vital to establish the next lawful heir to the throne or dukedom; wars and armed conflict have historically been the result of such lack of accepted evidence.
‘Family History’ is much broader. It encompasses genealogy, in so far as you need to discover birth, marriage and death dates, and any children, for your ancestors. However, this basic genealogical information constitutes only the foundations. What a Family Historian should aim to do is to find out how the ancestor lived and worked.
Family History is much more a journey of exploration of your ancestor’s life – the area in which they lived and worked, what their homes were like, what jobs they did and how they did them, did they need to cope with sickness and poverty. And to do this, you need to look beyond Censuses, civil Birth, Marriage and Death records, and Parish Registers.
You will need to delve into a whole host of other sources. If your ancestors were poor, then Poor Law and Workhouse records are a must to investigate. If your ancestors were better off, then you should look at tax records and wills.
And if your ancestors were in the armed forces or spent time in prison, you’ll get a description of what they looked like and what happened to them while they were in these institutions.
And that’s only the start! There is much more information you can find to build up your Family History. If you want the comprehensive list of where to find the sources you can research, especially those in the first half of the 19th Century and before, then go to the home page of this website and you’ll find it’s all set out in my book ‘How To Track Down Your Ancestors’.
You’ll then be able to start building a ‘proper’ Family History of your ancestors!
