Webmaster's note: This article was written in 1989 - there are numerous helpful website addresses on the Links page which you can visit for more information.
The first two stages of family history normally take place at home and in St Catherine's House in London. The first step is to turn out the loft for old photographs and family papers and ask your older relatives about their parents and grandparents. You should visit the General Register Office, St Catherine's House, 10 Kingsway, London WC2, to look at the indexes of births, marriages and deaths since 1837 and to order, for a fee, the actual certificates. Begin with the earliest known marriage and search backwards for alternate births and marriages.
One of the old photographs owned by my own relatives was of an old man who they said was my grandfather's grandfather, who had died aged 91 about 1932. No one knew his first name or where he had originally come from. The search therefore had to start nearer the present. I knew from family information that his grandson (my grandfather) was born in 1898 in Burnley, the son of Edward Lewis and Eliza Parkinson. Searching the marriage indexes backwards from 1898 revealed matching entries in the second quarter of 1892 for an Edward Lewis and an Eliza Parkinson. The certificate gave Edward's father's name as Henry Lewis and his occupation as blacksmith.
Since Edward was aged 23 when he married on 2 April 1892, he must have been born beween 3 April 1868 and 2 April 1869 and I was able to find his birth certificate, from which I go the names of both parents. That led to their marriage certificate. By then I knew a lot more about the old man in the photograph. Henry Lewis, whose father John was an engine driver, was 21 when he married Isabella Wiseman of Burnley on 6 February 1864. A blacksmith, he was living at Cononley in the West Riding of Yorkshire. The couple were married nearby at Skipton Register Office. Later I found from a directory of Burnley that he was still a blacksmith between 1893 and 1908, and also where he lived then. So far, however, I have not found his family in the censuses of 1861, 1871 or 1881, or his birth certificate. Burnley is dauntingly big to search through the census systematically and my ancestor could be any one of the numerous Henry Lewises whose births were registered in 1842-3.
Note: Visit the Links page for information about websites holding Census Records and Birth, Marriage and Death Records.
