Putting flesh on the bones of your ancestor

Working as a family history researcher, I try to find out as much as possible about the ancestors of my clients. Sometimes I find a pot of gold: an 18th century court case, perhaps, which gives me a potted history of the accused; or a bankruptcy case, or an illegitimate child.

So I think it's a shame more people don't make use of all the available resources to flesh out the bare bones of their family tree.

I don't disagree that it's really exciting to find the names of your ancestors and to make a family tree out of that.

But you shouldn't stop there, because the chances are high their names appear on some dusty piece of paper languishing in a county archive or newspaper store somewhere.

Many people assume their ancestors were poor and therefore would have left no paper trail. But it's wrong to assume. Even if they were very poor, they may have applied for parish relief and been interviewed to establish whether they qualified.

That document may survive, giving their place of birth and history of how they got into the mess in which they find themselves.

They might also have appeared in court, or in the pages of a newspaper, and what if they were hauled up before the parish officials for some wrongdoing?

Their children may have been apprenticed to a local landowner, or attended a charity school.

Ok, so I have experience in looking at all sorts of documents and know where to find them, and I don't want to give away all my secrets! But there is one basic thing anyone can easily do, particularly if you know where your ancestor lived in the United Kingdom.

Type their name into www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/a2a/. This fantastic website is an online database of millions of documents held at county record offices and other archives across the UK.

You won't be able to see the whole record (to do that you'll have to visit the archive, or employ me to do so), but you should be able to get enough from it to tell whether it relates to your ancestor or not.