My family tree - the first steps

I had now made the decision to start to record my family tree.

By now the internet was well established and, as with any question, I explored the web for alternative ways to store family tree data and for online data sources. I was amazed by what I found.

There were various possibilities for how to keep the data and an incredible variety of data sources.

Before I decided how best to store my data, I wanted to gather some more information

My cousin gave me a copy of the family tree he had prepared in a gedcom file.
This was very exciting because his information was stored in a linked database, which, with a gedcom file reader, showed the relationships between family members in a tree like structure.

This tree meant that there was already a record of some of my family on my father's side so I wanted to start by seeing how much of my mother's side I could put together.

I knew that I had had some great aunts who had come to England from Austria and were related to my mother. Unfortunately they were no longer around so I could not talk to them to gain more information. They had not had any children who might know more. Apart from anything more that I could find out from my mother, I would need to find another way to gather information.

Whilst looking on the web, I had discovered that a lot of UK genealogical data was available online. Some of this information could be accessed without charge.

I knew that births, deaths and marriages need to be registered and I discovered that records were maintained by the General Records Office. The recording of births, marriages and deaths was started in 1837. There is a Civil Registration index and copies of certificates can be ordered from the GRO website but at a cost, so this would be an expensive way to gather information so I considered that it was not the way forward at this stage.

The GRO site referred me to another site, Free BMD, that I had already discovered. The GRO does not have web access to the index and suggests that the Free BMD site can be used to explore the index to get reference numbers which then makes ordering a certificate easier. Certain libraries also provide access to the index.

The aim of Free BMD is to transcribe the Civil Registration index of births, marriages and deaths for England and Wales, and to provide free Internet access to these transcribed records. This is an ongoing project carried out by teams of dedicated volunteers and so far contains index information for the period 1837-1983. It is not yet complete.

I knew that two of these great aunts had died more recently than 1983 so their deaths did not show on Free BMD. I realised that although there was a lot of useful information that I would be able to get from Free BMD, I needed other sources to progress this search.