Making a Family Tree

Posted on 2004/01/24 16:23:41 (January 2004) by john.

Everything you need to know in order to do it for yourself.

I've recently been building my family tree. All the information I've gathered is on the web:

(click here).

I've had a lot of success and some of the discoveries have been really fascinating for me. For the first time ever I've found out the name of my great, great, great grandfather, fittingly also called John Hawkins. I've been able to discover a lot about his son, Vernon John Charles Hawkins (my great great grandfather), who was very high up in Portsmouth and Brighton United Breweries - one of the companies that joined together to form modern day Whitbread. I've also been able to find out about his brothers and sisters a bit. Next down from there, my great grandfather, Basil St. Helier Hawkins, who I was lucky enough to meet in my own life time. He had a total of nine brothers and sisters, apparently many of whom moved to Australia, so it's kind of exciting to think of a wing of the Hawkins family on the other side of the world - who knows, maybe I might even be able to meet them one day.

It's starting to get very frustrating now though. I have a lot of loose ends, where I just can't seem to proceed any further. Apparently, Hawkins is something like the 14th most common surname in England. There seem to be bloody loads of them in America too, clogging up the internet.... and this is one of the first times I've found Google a bit of a let down - search for a person's name as a phrase, knowing a page about that person exists, and you'll get any amount of irrelevant rubbish instead. There are dedicated genealogy websites, with searchable indices, but a lot of these you have to pay for. I wouldn't mind so much, but no one resource ever gives you the whole picture.

If anyone else is thinking about trying similar research on their families, a good place to start is the UK census records. A cenus has been carried out in the UK every ten years since 1801, and a couple of them are searchable and available on the web.

I started out with the 1901 census for England and Wales. You have to pay to access the records, something like 50 pence per entry, and typically it requires trawling through a few irrelevant ones before you get to the one that actually relates to your family members. Still though, it's a government run website by the looks of things, so I didn't feel quite so bad about paying for it. If you're my sort of age (in your twenties) then it's likely your great grandparents generation will have been born just before the end of the 1800s, so they should show up as young children in the 1901 census. Hopefully you'll already have a vague idea of names and so on for some of your great grandparents - you might have even known them when you were young. You might have an inckling about where they lived, and maybe even know some of their brothers and sisters' names. Clues like these help to track down the right household.

The 1881 census is also available online at familysearch.org, and better still can be searched for free. If you're in my sort of age group, this will probably be before your great grandparents' generation were born, so you're in the territory of great great grandparents instead.

Other UK census years are also available online - I think some of 1871 and 1891 are available at ancestry.com or ancestry.co.uk. You have to pay for these though, more like a lump sum up front, which seemed pretty steep to me, so I've decided not to bother (yet...).

Once I'd got some general information from the censuses, I then used it to try and help track down birth and marriage records. There are national indices for births, marriages and deaths going back to 1837 in the UK, and these are available online. The images (scanned pages, sometimes handwritten) for all the indices up to more or less the present date are available at 1837 online. On the downside, you have to pay for this (something like 10p per page viewed), and as it's the images you're looking at rather than transcribed entries, it's not particularly great for searching through, if you don't already know more or less what you're looking for.

Perhaps better is FreeBMD. This is a project to transcribe all the indices for births, marriages and deaths. It's still ongoing, so there are gaps in place. On the plus side though, it's free, and it's much quicker and easier to search, as the indices are stored as actual text rather than just images of text.

These indices aren't always particular verbose though. Typically an entry will just tell you the quarter of the year the birth, marriage or death took place, the person's name, plus the registration district and a volume/page number.

However, given these details, you can then go to the GRO's certificate ordering service and order a birth, marriage or death certificate. These cost seven quid each, so you'll probably want to make sure you're asking for the right one first. They take about a week to arrive. This then tells you useful details like an exact place and date of birth, plus details about the person's parents which let your family tree grow further,

To keep track of all the information as I've gathered it I've been using GenoPro. This is really great, as it lets you draw out your family tree, but also attach comments and pictures to each individual or family. It then automatically generates webpages for you (which is where my site. comes from).

Bollocks. Now I've got no excuse for not doing it too... I've been toying with idea for ages. Grr. Damn you 'awkins.

Posted by tom at 2004/01/25 19:50:18.

Thanks for the info, John. As I've said before, I'm jealous you've done this first!

Posted by Rob Lang at 2004/01/27 24:03:49.

I would be even better if you could change youir family tree, preferably to a generous rich one.

Posted by Boomer at 2004/02/13 12:23:23.

Cool program... I even bought the full version (£13 via paypal!). I've got about 130 people in the family tree so far, and I've not had to resort to online search yet. I've interviewed on of Sarah's Grandmothers already and I'm off to interview my Grandma soon. This should get me up to 200 people I recon.

Posted by tom at 2004/02/18 18:48:44.

Bloody hell, that's good going Tom! I'm only at around the 170 mark, and I've exhausted just about everything I can think of now... Perhaps a few more I can fill in on my Mum's side, and I guess thinking about it I've been rather biased towards dead people, and somewhat neglected a fair number of people who are actually alive.

First one to 1000 wins a prize...?

Posted by John at 2004/02/19 10:10:15.

Ok! You're on. (I wonder if there are any Bradley Rowans....)

Posted by tom at 2004/02/19 10:54:13.

Thanks, John! I found this really helpful (links, ideas, etc). Good luck with your research. BTW, I use Family Historian. Don't know GenoPro.

Posted by Mike at 2004/04/19 14:10:11.

i ahte this wesb sad

Posted by amal at 2004/11/21 23:38:25.

Thanks for the links. I'm to looking for my Hawkins family tree. I'll call back when I have more Information! You never no we might be related

Posted by Phillip at 2007/08/04 17:24:02.

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