A few years ago when my remaining parent died I found myself wondering what happened to the large family I used to see in my youth. Both mum and dad came from large families, and mum had always kept records of who to contact and how they fitted into the family.
I Needed a Family Tree
I decided I needed to somehow build a family tree but had no idea on what the best way to do that was. There were also a few stories about generations long passed that I had always wondered if there was any truth in. I had seen posts for several websites that you could initially sign up for free, and so I decided to take the plunge with Ancestry.com.
Building a Tree
Creating a tree is relatively easy to start off with. I know my name, date and place of birth, and both my parents. I know some Aunties and Uncles, some Cousins but it gets less certain from there. Families drift apart and so getting confirmation on the above is more complicated.
The Hint System
Thankfully Ancestry has a hint system which uses information you have entered to compare against a huge recordset including facts (census, marriage, births, deaths etc.) and hearsay (other family trees on Ancestry where some facts may be available but mostly guesswork).
Problems I Encountered
Once I started, hints were coming from everywhere mostly from other people’s trees with several variations of the dates and names of siblings and children. The further back I went the more this seemed to be an issue. Often whole families of 13 children would duplicate giving me sometimes stories where great-uncles had 26 children in 45 years and died at the age of 160, obviously something was wrong! The best advice is to take these trees with a pinch of salt unless they included sources.
Adding DNA
I was so pleased with the tree I had created, by now including several thousand people and links to knights and royals. I decided to take advantage of an offer to have a DNA test and add it to my tree. The benefit of this is that it would also look for matches and give me the results. People could be contacted and long lost family found. In reality there are around 30,000 matches to my DNA although only a handful who are classed as close family i.e. 4th cousin or closer. For context, a 4th cousin shares a great-great-great-grandparent of which there are many. Some matches have trees that overlap, and some have no trees and have surnames that are not familiar. I have also found most people do not want to respond to a message or have left their accounts dormant (last accessed over a year) if they are still with us.
Overall
Overall I have had a lot of success with Ancestry, and coupled with a few external searches (Social Media, directory enquiries, Scotlands people, GRO database, burial records) I have managed to trace family close and far back to the 15th Century. I have extended this to researching for friends and have successfully found several ancestors where people had been adopted.
Am I a Genealogist? I would say it’s a successful hobby.
Please contact me if you think this is a service I could help you with.