I have been asked to write a bit about how I have developed my family tree.This has been a project many years in the making, and has given me hours of insight and delight, not only in discovering interesting new facts about my family but also the opportunity to make many new acquaintances and friends that happen to be related.

My father came to the United States with his parents in 1929 - they were in Canada for five years prior to this. I was lucky enough to be able to ask my grandparents to write down what they knew of their families before they died, well before information could be widely found on the Internet. I pursued that as far as I could without the benefit of my computer and then set it aside for a decade or so.Besides, I was busy raising children. However, for Mother’s Day in 2005 I was given “Outlander” by Diana Gabaldon, which is a best-selling historical novel set in mid-18th century Highland Scotland. I was curious to see whether I could discover if any recognizable family names were recorded at Culloden. It was then I discovered the wealth of genealogical information on the Internet.

Allow me to give you a personal example:- First of all, it is critical to the following narrative to explain that I have posted my family tree, with information on people that may still be living removed, on about a half-dozen family tree-sharing websites.I do this to find relations that can fill in the holes - and also have found relations that have become friends.

My grandfather gave me the names of his siblings in order of birth… although he was one year off in all cases, which I did not discover immediately. You see, he lied about his age to get into the 42nd BlackWatch Regiment during World War I. Well, he ended up being heralded as the oldest surviving member of that legendary force during a ceremony at the Argyll Castle. He could barely admit after all those years that he was really one year younger…

Anyway, after determining that he was actually born in 1899 I looked for his siblings on the ScotlandsPeople website (see below), adjusting for that one year difference. I found all but one... Andrew, who wasn’t born in Fife like all the rest but in Lanark. My second cousin in Dublin found that for me – and my cousin and I found each other via Rootsweb (also below).

I have so many interesting stories that I discovered... the aunt I had that died at 4 months of age and who was left in Scotland. My grandparents never spoke of her – my father didn’t even know he had an older sister. The only mention of her was in a local newspaper article that chronicled my grandfather’s life when he turned 100 – he said he had three children. Also, being able to prove that a couple of family legends were true --- sailors and Germans. In about 1775 there was a ship’s lad born in Prussia named Christopher Funkie. He was shipwrecked off of Prestonpans, made it to shore and never left. I traced his movement around the Firth into Fife via the births of his children... and everyone – absolutely EVERYONE – in Scotland with a family name of Funkie anywhere in their past is descended from this one man (not in the Thomson line .... this was an ancestor of the woman John Paton Thomson married).

And so to an explanation of the resources I used to track down genealogical information:

For Scottish records, the authoritative word for Scottish birth, marriage and death records is the government-sponsored website: www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk.

This site has scanned original civil documents and made them available for download. The service charges “credits” for searches and documents, which can be purchased in lots of 30 (30 credits for £6). It charges one credit for a search and 5 credits for an electronic copy of the actual document. The costs can quickly add up, but if you are any distance away from Edinburgh at all it is cheaper than either a personal visit or hiring a researcher to go to the General Records Office (GRO) on your behalf. Civil registrations started in 1855, and on birth, marriage and death records the parents’ names and occupations are listed. It is therefore quite easy to work backwards without error – at least back to 1855. Prior to 1855 the site will furnish old parish records. Births have parental names, but marriage Bann records do not, and death records are sketchy. The site also has census records and many old wills.

The Fife Family History Society has a CD that has death and burial records, but again the information can be a bit sketchy. What are commonly referred to as “brick walls” occur for many reasons: when a family was not religious and did not have a vital record event recorded at a church; when records have been lost or destroyed; when an adoption was not recorded; indexing and/or transcription records that make searching very difficult. That being said, there are many other records that might be useful, depending upon where your ancestor lived. Too many to be listed, my best advice would be to use an Internet search engine – that’s how I found the Scottish Record Society’s Parish of Holyroodhouse or Canongate Register of Marriages, 1564-1800.

There are other sites that try to be compendiums of genealogical resources, such aswww.genuki.org.uk andwww.cyndislist.com. There are numerous county history societies such as the Fife Family History Society that also have resources – however, many are not accessible online.

For very old records, www.familysearch.org is an excellent resource – as long as the record being viewed is a transcription of an actual church record and not a tree submitted by a member. Mistakes get made in family trees, and this site does not allow over-writes to submitted files. Therefore, if someone in good faith submits a file and learns later that a mistake has been made there is no way to replace erroneous information with accurate. This service is free and is a backbone to family researchers. It is best to check here before hitting a for-a-charge site.

A commercial site that has a vast collection of records is www.ancestry.com. This is a subscription service that is not cheap – however, if you desire to pour over Scottish census records at length, buying a subscription is significantly less expensive than using ScotlandsPeople. This site has all the publicly available US Canadian and UK census records. Scottish census records are indexed with no scanned copy of the original - original copies can be seen at ScotlandsPeople, except for 1881. Please be advised, though, that the transcribers often have to work with poor quality copies of original documents, and therefore you can expect to find transcription errors. It pays to be a good detective and have a questioning mind. The site also has immigration and border crossing records and all sorts of other documents that might not be expected - such as state-sponsored Pennsylvania and Wisconsin censuses, separate from any official national census. This site also allows researchers to upload their trees... this is invaluable not only in sharing information on relations that is not publicly available, but also in correcting bad information (like the time a researcher dutifully indicated an inaccurate birth year for an ancestor--- based upon that man’s lying about his age to a second spouse).

Other sites that are very useful in sharing genealogical data are:

www.genesreunited.co.uk - this is a modestly-priced site from which I have discovered many relations.It also has a service viewing historical records (which I have never used). It is UK-centric, so it meets our particular needs well.

www. worldconnect.rootsweb.com - this is a site that relies on brute force – uploading trees is free but there is no historical records capability.It currently lists 575 million names on file… but that includes duplicates. Not nearly as effective as any preceding sites, but I get an occasional hit. This site has a nice layout and a feature that allows downloading of gedcoms (NOTE: a gedcom is a universally accepted genealogical tree file format that can be imported into any commercial family tree software).

www.freecen.org.uk - As a final note on historical sources, there is a movement that has been afoot for several years that uses volunteers to transcribe England and Wales official records for free online access. These “freecen” , “freereg” and “freebmd” sites have become very useful if your ancestors lived in a parish for which records have been entered. As the volunteers capture more and more information these free sites will become quite valuable.

That’s a quick-and-dirty tutorial on where to start looking for information... what do you do with that, once you have found it? I highly recommend using a commercial family tree product. Oh, ancestry.com and genesreunited.co.uk allow you to build a tree online, as does myheritage.com. However, continuing access to those requires maintaining subscriptions. There will come a time where you believe you have completed, or substantially completed, your tree. Without having that information in your computer hard drive you become a prisoner to your subscription. That, by the way, is this writer’s opinion, only.

If you have questions about the above article you can contact Wendy Thomson via the Sennachie.

Added 21/09/2010