Getting started – a 25-year year-old perspective

It all started with a growing accumulation of facts about the family – mainly told to me by grandparents – when I was a child. However, I first actually put hand on birth register at the old St. Katherine’s House in the Aldwych around 25 years ago. And what a job it was! Hauling down large volumes from the shelves, dropping them with a bang on to the long tables and poring over the thumbed and occasionally semi-legible pages. Naive as I was, I ignored variant spellings of my surname and missed several direct ancestor records in the process!

The first bit of computerised data I used was in the basement of the Society of Genealogists and was the microfiche archive of the parish registers transcribed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) – now called familiarly the “LDS”. I made photocopies of all the pages containg my own name (Ainscough) and went through them checking all the Ainscoughs in Blackrod. I then fed all the names into a simple database program on my works mainframe computer and sorted birth records by parental names – producing potential families. As the forename “Ralph” occurs regularly in my family, I fixed on one particular set of children and checked them in the 1841 and 1851 census records – then in the old PRO building in Holborn. Success.

How much has changed since those days – the LDS microfiches turned into the FamilySearch facility, of which the International Genealogical Index (IGI) is just one part. The 1881 census came on line, together with CDs of the 1851 census for a few counties such as Norfolk. Rootsweb and Ancestry happened along, with databases and discussion lists and FreeBMD, and the whole thing has exploded. What would have taken me months of work, with travelling, etc., now takes a few hours – or even minutes.

There are currently over 48,000,000 million records on GenesReunited…!