Put The Family In The Family Tree

Add branches to the family tree by tracing distant cousins.

It’s too easy to become fixated with going back in time to find ancestors to add to your family tree. Stephen Rigden explains the benefits of adding branches by tracing distant cousins, and offers expert advice on techniques for finding them.

Family history is changing as its visibility in society and its popularity as a hobby increase. To generalise far too sweepingly, as recently as the 1980s, family history was the preserve of genealogists who were interested in ancestry and pedigree. Today, the pursuit of family history has become more populist and with this, the emphasis has changed. Yes, there is still an intense curiosity about origins: where we came from, who our antecedents were, what they did for a living. However, many more people now are just as interested in the family as the history in their family history: in other words, not just about going back in time, but also about researching into the present day to find living relatives.

Information technology has made it easier to find, say, the great grandchildren of your great grandfather’s brothers and sisters. BT’s telephone directory is available on the internet at http://www.118500.com. The electoral roll is now available too at various sites, including in the Living Relatives section on 1837online.com.

However, the internet age brings with it heightened concerns about privacy and fraud. This means that increasing numbers of telephone subscribers become ex-directory and voters opt out of the commercially available version of the electoral roll. Online purveyors of the roll now bolt on additional data acquired from other sources to try to compensate for the deficiencies of the opt-out roll. However, the rising population of people absenting themselves from the directory and the voters’ list means that finding a living relative is rarely as simple as googling the name.

Finding Living Relatives
With so many people engaged in tracing their family history now, the chances are increasing that there are distant cousins on the track of the same ancestors as you. Use search engines such as www.google.co.uk to see if anyone’s online family tree or personal website mentions some of your more obscurely named ancestors (this doesn’t work so well if you’re looking for William Smiths). Message boards and surname lists can help establish connections – find the most appropriate for you family from those listed at http://www.genuki.org.uk/indexes/SurnamesLists.html. It’s worth registering ancestors you’ve found in the 1881 census at www.lostcousins.com, as their software can turn up other people researching the same family, and if you’re lucky enough to find a match, it’s guaranteed that you’re related.

It is, of course, possible to find distant relatives even if they’re not active family historians. Before you can find those third cousins, though, you need to find out who they are. Researching family history in the Victorian era is relatively straightforward, as the core birth, marriage and death (BMD) indexes are supplemented by the 10-yearly family snapshots gifted to us by census returns. As you head beyond 1901 (the year of the most recent census currently available) towards the present day, these support sources drop away. For the most part, you are left with the BMDs.

The BMDs are what Americans call vital statistics and what cuter family historians have dubbed “hatches, matches and dispatches”. Everyone is hatched and eventually despatched, and plenty of us enjoy the privilege or endure the sentence – according to taste - of being matched too. In turn, matches lead to more hatches (although not all hatches are preceded by matches) and the cycle of life keeps turning.

How much research you have to undertake after 1901 to find living relatives on a line of your family depends on circumstances.

Research Techniques
The quickest path to success is to identify a relative born in, say, the 1920s. This is because you have two quick bites at the cherry. On the one hand, a person born in, say, 1920, might have died within the period 1984 to date, which is available as a fully searchable database (for instance on www.1837online.com). The death entry enables you to buy their death certificate and find out the name and address of the informant at death (often the son, daughter, spouse or sibling of the deceased). On the other hand, if you do not find a death entry, they might still be alive and you can trace them in the phone directory or the electoral roll.

These techniques work better for men than for women, whose surnames change upon marriage and who therefore might be present under a different and unknown name. Where you have a choice of third cousins born around the 1920s, select a male line.

If you find neither a death nor a current address, search the marriage index next. In the case of a woman who marries, you can then re-visit the phone directory and electoral roll using the new name (although this still won’t catch those women who married, and changed their name, more than once). Alternatively, look in the birth indexes from the date of marriage for any children. This process brings you closer to the present day and increases the probability that you will locate a living relative. If necessary, though, this process of searching for a marriage, then births, then marriage can be pursued right up to date: each generation you research gives you more options - more background information, more clues as to whereabouts and more people who could be found.

These searches can be supplemente by searching probte ccalendars (the annual list of estates for which Grants of Representation have been taken out) and obtaining copies of Wills

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