Moonfleetonline

That may not be everyone’s cup of tea, and it is very important when researching family history that you are meticulous about details and very methodical.  This is therefore going to be challenge for me in a number of ways!

I am planning to research my mother’s family first.  There are several reasons for this.  One is that there is a family legend that my great grandfather was disowned on his marriage to my great grandmother but there is no indication of why.  The second is that he was killed on the Somme in 1916, which is a period of history that my father is both very interested in and very knowledgeable about.

1901 census

I know my grandmother was born not long before the 1901 ensus was taken so this is where I shall start my search, using ancestry.co.uk. I know her name (maiden name of course) was Lane and her date of birth, 1899.  I also strongly suspect that she was born in London.  The great pitfall of doing online research (or any for that matter) is it is very easy to pick up the wrong person at some point in the search.  I have always therefore been told to use only the minimum of data initially in a search so as not to reject any ancestors by mistake.

There were five babies born in or around 1899 in London with the right name.  Since the census records the age of a person, not the year of their birth, slight (and not so slight) discrepancies can creep into the records.  The simplest one is just a result of whether someone’s birthday was before or after the census date.

The third record I look at reveals the correct person – easy to identify from the other members of the family since I recognise the names of my great grandparents and that of my grandmothers older brother.  I know nothing about any of these people except their names but that is enough to make a positive identification with certainty, especially as one of the names is slightly unusual.

Information recorded on the 1901 census for every individual

• Address where living
• Name
• Relationship to head of household
• Age and gender
• Profession or occupation
• Employed, worker or own account
• Where born
• Whether deaf and dumb, blind, lunatic, imbecile

So I now know where my great grandparents were born and when.  All the information I need for step 2, looking for a record of the marriage sometimes in the 1980s