Family History

Genealogy and family history

Strictly speaking, genealogy is not quite the same as family history. Genealogy is primarily about charting lines of ancestry. Family history is concerned more about who your ancestors were: where they lived, what they did for a living, how they met the person they married, how and when they died, and so on. It is a richer, more complex subject, far more open to interpretation. You end up with pieces of narrative, rather than charts.

It is often said that genealogy (the family tree) is the skeleton, and family history is the flesh on that skeleton, but of one is barely imaginable without the other. Many of the methods used for researching family history are exactly the same as those used for genealogy, or at least overlap.

Ask the family

In family history, the aim is to build up a comprehensive picture of your forebears: the kind of people they were, where they lived, what they did, how your family came to be as it is. To research this, the first step to tap into the pool of knowledge possessed by existing family members - especially the older ones. Talk to them about what you've heard concerning relatives of the past. Ask them about family legends, mysteries and scandals. Show them old photograph albums and ask them to identify the people pictured. Their answers may not always be entirely accurate, and may even be contradictory, but you can always check the details later against other accounts and records.

Keep notes

It is vital to write down all the scraps of information you accumulate. You think you will remember them, but you won't. Keep a notebook, or a loose-leaf file into which you can clip jottings, photocopies and so on. In the long run, small details and snippets of information can be as valuable as more thorough accounts: a mention that so-and-so played in a soccer team, worked in a certain shop, had a previous marriage, spent the war in Singapore and so on.

Public records

Your research will yield plenty of mysteries and contradictions. You can use public records to verify the bare bones of the story (see Public Records). Certificates of birth, marriage and death will help to nail the details of name, date and place. Census returns show not only where people lived, but the households they lived in, where they came from originally, and what they did for a living. Other details can be cross-checked, and perhaps expanded upon, by looking at local records, newspaper reports, trade and commercial histories, war records and so.

A legacy for future generations

Gradually you will build up a body of material that can be rewritten into a readable account of your family's history. This could be written up as book-like narrative, starting with the earliest-known facts and moving chronologically through to the present. But this is a major undertaking. Alternatively, you can simply keep your records as a series of notes and observations. But make them accessible and presentable. This is, after all, valuable and hard-won research  and something that will be treasured by generations to come.