Tracing the ones who went away

Published on Monday 9 October 2006 10:03

IT IS an unusual family tree indeed in which some of the branches don't stray over the fences marking the borders of Scotland or whose roots don't, in places, grow from beyond them. Immigrants and emigrants or even temporary strays – how do you track them down?

The good news is that this is perhaps one area of ancestry research which has gained most from the magic of the web.

Let's start with those ancestors who didn't have to cross the seas:

England and Wales

There are two items of very good news for you.

All censuses from 1841 to 1901 can be consulted online, free or for very little cost

All indexes to births, marriages and deaths are available, many of them entirely free

These alone should go a long way to tracking down your errant forebears.The censuses

The 1881 census is a good starting point. Firstly, it covers people who might well have been born at the time of Waterloo and those who could well have lived until after the Second World War. That covers a great slice of most people's collection of ancestors.

Secondly, it is free. Go to the great Mormon site familysearch.org - and click on Advanced Search and then Census and then British Census. You are through to all those people living in England and Wales in April 1881. Now it's all up to you.

The 1881 records may of course miss the folk you are looking for. They might have had a fairly temporary flitting. The other censuses are all available, with payment this time, from such sites as ancestry.co.uk or 1837online.com.

Born, married or died south of the Border

It is rare for the Sassenach to outdo the Scot in matters genealogical, but in terms of state registration of births, marriages and deaths, the former undoubtedly did. State records began in England and Wales in 1837, 18 years before Scotland got in on the act.

The downside is that, unlike in Scotland, these records cannot be consulted directly. You have to buy a copy of the relevant entry.

So how can you find out if, where and when an event did take place? Start with the free search of the index. Go to freebmd.org.uk. This is a massive attempt to transcribe all the registers and offer them free. To date, a very useful proportion of the total is available, the eager beavers having just passed the 150 million mark! (You can click on the home page and see for example what percentage of the births in the first quarter of 1862 has been completed.)

If the free search fails, both the ancestry and 1837 sites mentioned above offer a paid search of the indexes.

Once you are reasonably sure you have the right individual, you can send off for a copy to gro.gov.uk.

If you know where your folk lived south of the Border, don't forget the local family history societies – England has a wealth of them. The Federation of Family History Societies knows all about them and much, much more. Look at the federation's site on ffhs.org.uk. You'll not regret it.

The Irish connection

Linked closely by heritage and geography there has always been much to-ing and fro-ing between Scotland and Ireland. This was accelerated in the 19th century as Irish families fled the aftermath of the famine. As a result, many of today's Scots will find their roots run across the Irish Sea three or four generations ago.

For you, alas, there is bad news. The Irish genealogical records are by far the poorest in the British Isles. State registration started later and to compound the problem, most of those were used as barricades in the Four Courts siege of 1922. In prising out the "rebels", De Valera's forces destroyed census and birth, marriages and deaths records almost in their entirety.

Ireland, proud of its heritage, has done much to improve the situation, retrieving church records and making available the census data of 1901 earlier than the usual 100 years rule. But they of course are much too late to cover the families who left in the 1800s.You will need to use a website such as genuki.org.uk (this will lead you to more specific Irish sites) or the Mormon's site (listed above). If you track down the county where your forebears lived, Genuki for example can lead you to books, special studies and graveyard transcripts.

The Mormon site is especially helpful for earlier church records of births, marriages and deaths in Ireland. It may also throw up ancestral work that has been done by relatives of yours.

Across the seas

Paradoxically, the further your forebears travelled, the better the sources are. The Scottish ancestor-hunter will relish the facilities from the US and Canada, Australia and New Zealand, the new homes for many a Scot. The two sites mentioned above are again a good entry point. Use a search engine such as Google to find specific sites and a site such as ancestry.com (listed above) will give access to all available censuses.

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