Discover your ancestors - genealogy from documents to DNA

In this session we introduce family trees.  What are they and how do they represent your ancestry?

We will explore motivation and what you want to learn from exploring your ancestry.

Genealogy is answering a very basic question - where do I come from?  You can approach this in different ways. 

You may choose to understand your pedigree - who were your ancestors and how might they have contributed to who you are?

Or you may explore the stories from your ancestors lives.  How did they live?  What were their experiences?

Central to building a family tree is accessing and managing data about your ancestors.

In this session we look at what sort of data we will be retrieving and how it would best be managed.

We explore what the key data items are for a family tree and how they would be stored.

This session covers how you would build the tree on paper but also how newer technology would help in storing the data online.

In this session I show you how to start your own family tree.

The session focusses on the "ancestry" site as a tool to store tree data.

We look at how the tools manage and store tree data and how you can use this to build and extend your own tree.

This session gives you the capability to start creating and extending your own family tree using web-based tools.

The first place to start looking when building your own family tree is your own family.

This session looks at how you can start your tree by capturing knowledge and stories from within your own family.

Before you look at on-line research there is often plenty of information to access from your relations.

In this section of the course we look at using the internet as a source of ancestry data.

We introduce what records might be available online, comparing free and paid options.

This session also looks at how internet searches for ancestry data may be used to find key information.

Although there are a wide range of data available online, it can be difficuly to extract exactly what is needed.

In this session we look at how best to use the data sources available.

In particular this session looks at how to focus on your tree and on using online data for extending the tree.

Census data is perhaps the most valuable data in building trees over a specific timeframe.

This session looks at when census data is available and what data is found in a census.

We then investigate how the census data can be used most effectively in the process of building and extending a family tree.

"Vital" data covers births, marriages and deaths and is one of the key sets of data in genealogy.

This session looks at how to access and use this key data in building your tree.

In the UK, the 1939 register is a key document for ancestry research.

In this session we look at why this document is so useful, what you can learn from it, and some of the areas where it is different from any other genealogy document.

Many of our ancestors will have served in the armed forces at some time.

The additional records available relating to service personnel can be a valuable source of both background information and key dates.

A successful researcher will often work collaboratively with other researchers.

A frequently under-used resource in genealogy is the set of trees created by other people investigating their own ancestry.

In this session we look at how online tools can be used to search the public research of other genealogists and to fit their discoveries into your own family tree.

In this session we look specifically at surnames and tracing surnames within a family tree.

Many people may start genealogy specifically with the intent of investigating their family name.

However, this can be harder than expected.  This session looks at some of the challenges around surnames, especially around how to search ancestry records for specific surnames.

This section of the course introduces DNA data and how this is used.

This shows on how DNA data can be accessed through online tools (at extra cost).

In this section we look at how the DNA data can give broad information about your ethnicity which can help answer questions about your ancestry.

In this session we look in more depth at what can be learned from DNA data with online tools.

Combining DNA data with conventional genealogy approaches can help to unlock more clues about your ancestry.

Using DNA data to build trees may feel quite theoretical.  This Case Study is a real example of how data from my own family tree, available to me through ancestry.com, builds into a "DNA tree" structure.  And this can then be compared with the data which I have from ancestry records.