Afternoon all,

Got an email saying Ancestry are having a free weekend last week and decided to try and trace some family back a few generations. Knowing my parents and grandparents names and DOB give or take I was easily able to find them and their birth/marriage certificates, fantastic.

I do not know my Great Grandparents names or DOB. I essentially have Great Grandmothers maiden name and inferred marriage name to go on. There is absolutely no links, help or records for this easily accessible. I have no clue how people do this without some further help, am I missing this? Can you access individual birth certificates to see full names etc? Not sure how I narrow down Parsons and Walker from Derbyshire into certain relative.

Cheers,

P

Use the census records for your grandparents this will show their parents and where they were born, then simply step back. It should be easy to get back to 1841 after that it’s parish records and not all are available. It gest easier further back less people/static population in many cases. Once you get your head around it its family simple

Don’t your grandparents records have details of their parents?

I don’t subscribe to it but my cousin does & he’s done a good job, getting
back to the late 1700’s on my Mum’s side.
I can get on it but find it hard to do much with.

Thanks for the heads up.

Census records are the way to go but it can be difficult.

Even with a detailed family tree for me to follow I struggled to find the census records for my grandparents.

Deaths, moves, re-marriages of step-parents with subsequent surname changes can all make it a very frustrating, but also a rewarding, experience.
A lot could happen in 10 years!

For my grandfather I just googled his name and birth year and someone had already compiled his family tree back to 1750! For these websites, once you pin down one family member you should be able to see who else has listed them, which speeds things up.

Good luck!

Really depends on the approximate dates of birth of grandparents or great-grandparents.
If after 1910-ish, and you find birth entry in the indexes, then you get the mother’s maiden name, which can be a clue.
Quite a few marriage entry records or banns now are viewable in full on Ancestry, so there you get details of both fathers, plus addresses that quite possibly match census return. 1911 census can be very helpful, since it’s the most recent, has many more details, is readable, and depending on how old you are, possibly contains relatives that you have known personally living at an address of a previous family home that you know about.