This blog is based on a presentation first given by me at Christchurch City Libraries’ 2023 Family History Expo called Is Richard Nixon my ninth cousin: what I have found doing my family history. Please note I am not certain if he is my ninth cousin – FamilySearch’s Famous Relatives! feature isn’t exactly consistent. Indeed, Ronald Reagan has turned up there since the last time I looked. Anyway, let’s look at some tips which are more helpful. First a quick caveat, this will be an English and English diaspora centric (and Welsh by jurisdiction extension) presentation. However, these principles are broadly universal, and for anywhere else the FamilySearch Research Wiki is a great place to start. If you are not ready to create an online tree or investigate tree software, then free charts are super handy and can be downloaded for free from various places including the New Zealand Society of Genealogists. Of course these can fill up quickly and also depend on how neat your writing is. Don’t forget to keep a note of your sources, as I’m sure you do, being organised types. Work from the known to the unknown, as this really helps you to triangulate information. Talk to relatives too. Of course this depends on your individual family circumstances, and people still being alive when you get interested (cos I wasn’t until the last few years. Indeed, seeing a printed-out tree form, as mentioned above, inspired my interest – what would it look like if I filled one in?). Memory also helps – recognising names or addresses from youth can be helpful to confirm facts. Of course, families will have legends that cannot be substantiated. For example, Oliver Cromwell is supposed to be an ancestor of mine. From talking to relatives, I do have clues which line this might relate to, but I get stuck after a few generations going backwards and the genealogy of Cromwell doesn’t have any obvious links going forward. Some legends will stay just that. Moving on to looking at records, spelling can be heaps of fun. It evolves over time, those writing in censuses can misspell names, and transcription can go wrong (someone writing Key as Kay caused me to go on a wild goose chase) as can OCR. A big hurrah for those who correct these errors eg Voluntroves! Some online databases are good at fuzzy searching, others are very unforgiving, so be sure to try every variation you can think of. In my family the Caston name is also Castons, Chasten, Causton, Custen. And when I couldn’t find Catherine Hartwell nee Caston’s death certificate she turned up under Katherine. Beware of middle names, while these can be very helpful, they can appear and disappear quite alarmingly. Also, concerning names, there can be more people of the same name in the same area than you’d expect. Surnames could be quite localised but people in these families weren’t always that adventurous with first names. I know a great x 3 grandmother was called Martha Rope, but there were 3 Martha Ropes born in East Norfolk to two sets of parents called Robert and Amy in 1785-6, and I don’t know which are the correct pair. While it may be tempting to stick to the bigger family history databases it is well worth working between them and outside of them. Ancestry may be great for Norfolk parish records, but Find My Past is the place for the Lincolnshire equivalent. Some things that are on Ancestry under their Fold3 service for an extra subscription are available under a standard Find My Past subscription (and remember your local library may well have subscriptions to all these services). There are still unique records available from sources such as the UK National Archives, country record offices – eg Lincolnshire Archives has minute books for some parishes – local history societies and family history groups. It’s always worth looking in as many places as you can for clues and evidence. While there are many records that aren’t digitised yet or will never be, more records come online all the time. The other week I was very excited to discover lots of Suffolk and Cambridgeshire parish records had been added to Ancestry. This meant I could confirm several facts and see originals of documents I’d only ever seen transcribed. And as you learn about your family it can be useful to go back over records you’ve already looked at as you can glean extra information – like confirming that a marriage witness was a married sister etc. I always like to have a map open when I’m working on family history. It helps me work out the relationships of people to place, and whether a record makes sense in that context. Often families would stay in broadly the same area for generations, but they would also move for a variety of reasons – industrialization, poverty, colonialism. I’ve certainly enjoyed discovering the part of my family that have made their way to the US, Canada and Australia. One branch even made it to New Zealand! When it comes to choosing a digital platform or software to put your tree on there are heaps of good comparison articles out there in magazines and online. However, one of the key things to be aware of with online platforms which host public created family trees is to always do your due diligence when using them. These platforms are full of records, but it is algorithms and humans who create the connection between them. Mistakes can easily be made, so if you are taking info from another tree always check it – it could be right, but also it could be misleading. As you would do with any source assess it carefully. Lastly, DNA is not a magic bullet – warch this space for more on this. So if you are beginning your family history I hope these tips – which are by no means exhaustive or unique – give you a few pointers […]

Dear Minister Simeon Brown We write to you as transgender and takatāpui young people of Aotearoa New Zealand to ask you to reconsider your decision to ban the use of puberty blockers (gonadotropin-re...