If you’ve already started researching your family history, you’ll have a rough idea of the types of records required to find the information you need. These would be birth, death and marriage records, census records, ship passenger lists, war records, cemetery and monument inscriptions to mention just a few. It wasn’t that long ago that these records could only be obtained by writing overseas to various institutions and we had to wait a long time, sometimes months for letters to travel back and forth through the post.
But did you know that most of these types of records are now available on the Internet? A lot of these are free to access, but there are some websites that do charge a small fee.
Parish registers of births (christenings), marriages, and deaths (burials) form an increasing volume of records now available online and can contain valuable and reliable information as the people recording these were usually literate and often eyewitnesses to the event. More and more of these records are being transcribed and being made available to the savvy Internet user.
Census records are good source of information too, although transcribers differed considerably in their abilities and conscientiousness, including their handwriting. In most countries, the census taker relied on information from the family head and that varied greatly with incorrect spelling, age differences, even birthplace errors. Census records are available online too.
Even though the Internet contains an ever-increasing amount of digitized records being made available to us, these records are only the product of those people (usually volunteers) transcribing them and cannot … and should not … be relied upon without confirmation.
So before you get too excited that you have found a missing ancestor, please verify what you have discovered online with official proof in the form of the hard copies of the birth, death or marriage certificates or paper copies of whatever the event might have been. Too often I have heard of someone tracking back a particular family line only to find out they’d been researching the wrong person.
