Getting to grips with Family Reconstruction
ESSENTIAL SEARCH SKILLS TO MASTER
Throughout 2021, the Family Tree Academy will be there to help you grow your genealogy skills.
As ever, the aim will continue to be to help teach more about the search skills and source know-how needed to step up your family history research.
In this issue, Family Tree Academy tutor David Annal discusses how to overcome a research roadblock by enlisting a research approach known as family reconstruction.
Research skills
Researching 19th and 20th century ancestors in England and Wales is, in most cases, relatively straight forward. We have access to a number of remarkable sources, notably the General Register Office’s civil registration records of births, marriages and deaths stretching right back to 1837, and the National Archives’ collection of decennial census returns, covering the whole of the country from 1841 all the way up to 1911.
In theory at least, it’s all fairly plain sailing and, with easy access to online databases, tracing a line of descent back to someone who was born in the early part of the 19th century isn’t usually too much of a struggle.
The problem
But what happens when we leave behind the comfort of the mid-to-late-19th century and venture into uncharted territories, without the safety net of the familiar births, marriages and deaths, and census returns? there’s still a lot of useful
