Part Two of Burke's Peerage &

Part Two of
Burke's Peerage & Gentry's
Beginners Guide to
Tracing your Ancestry

By Roger Powell, MA,
Worldwide Ancestral
Research Services

www.wars-genealogy.co.uk out.

By now searches in all of the above records will have given you a vast amount of information on your family surname. However, the trick is to make sure that you have put your family's ancestry together correctly. If you have, then you will feel confident enough to go onto the next stage.

Ideally each piece of information that you collect should contain within it the clues that will take you onto the next generation. This is particularly true of burial entries, to be of any real value they should give an age at death so that you can calculate an approximate date of birth. If there is a matching baptism in the registers all well and good but if not then searches will have to be carried out in surrounding parishes.

Another example is where your ancestor marries in the parish of his bride and then goes back to his own home parish where all of his children are later baptized. In most cases his home parish will be given in the marriage register, thus making your search for his baptism that much easier.

If you have no age at death, then you will have to make an educated guess about how old he was at the time his first child was baptized. The standard practice is to calculate thirty years backwards. If you then find that there are several individuals of that name baptized around that date, you will have to try and eliminate some by determining if they died as infants or died unmarried, etc. So you see, it is not always straightforward or easy attempting to trace your ancestry.

In this section:

Chapter Four out.

• Apprenticeship Records

Chapter Five out.

• Removal and Settlement Material
• Bastardy Papers
• Militia Lists and Muster Rolls

Chapter Six out.

• Occupation and professions
• Army Records

Useful contacts out.

Click here out. to return
to the introduction.