Abstract of the Inaugural Lecture delivered by Mr Cecil Humphrey-Smith, BSc., FHS., FHG.
A short talk about the way in which to start tracing a family history and suggested suitable reading material for the beginner
CLOTHING THE FAMILY SKELETON
There is more to the study of family history than the tracing of a pedigree. It also means finding out what your great-grandfather did for a living, what he wore, and what he had for his supper. The raw materials for the tracing of a pedigree can be recovered from the Central Register of Births, Marriages and Deaths? from the Census Returns; from local newspapers, which often go back two hundred, and sometimes even three hundred years; from Wills; from legal and commercial documents; and from family letters and papers.
These give you a skeleton of names, dates, places and relationships. What I think one ought to be more interested in is clothing the skeleton with the stuff that makes family history.
The family is the basic unit of our civilisation. The people we read about in history books and newspapers are those who have, for some reason, become noticed, but the core of history is composed of men and women who have never done anything extraordinary.
It has been found that the average farm-worker of the past rarely moved more than eight miles from the home of his family, while more influential families were, if anything, more static still. In a peninsula like Kent, with relatively bad communications, this stability is of great help to a researcher in tracing his ancestry.
Tracing one's ancestors is perhaps a rather self-regarding activity and not of immediate fascination to other people. Once, however, you have been able to fill out the details of their lives from inventories, wills and letters, you have the makings of a historical study of interest to everyone.
For the interested beginner, there are courses of lectures available at a number of colleges and universities: soon, it is hoped, also at Canterbury. From these, you get the basic ideas about tracing ancestry.
The first step then is to consult all your most senior relatives and to ask them what they know. And here you invariably come to regret that you have not consulted them sooner, before failing memory or death have obscured the past. Much of what they tell you will be inaccurate, much highly exaggerated, much apocryphal. But there will be a nucleus of truth in it, which you will eventually be able to disengage by diligent comparison with the testimony of others. All information; when you collected it; and from whom: should be entered on index cards and filed with cross-references, if possible, to a pedigree chart. The next step is to draft a pedigree of your immediate family and then to invite all those who appear on it to add to it. Contact everyone on it and ask them for details of their life-style and fortunes. Consider whether or not a pattern of vocation emerges in your family. Whether you find yourself dealing with professional people or labourers, consider that every family has its own famous or anonymous role in contributing to the history of the county and the nation.
Eventually, having exhausted the immediate sources, you should contact people with the same surname, as listed in Electoral Rolls, Town Directories, Telephone Directories, ask them to help you, and relate them to your own pedigree if you can. If you write asking them a question, be prepared to answer questions in return.
So build up your data that you can be of value to the community that bears your name.
Recommended reading:
- Frank Smith, Lives of our English Ancestors;
- H. M. Trevelyan, Social History of England; Oxford paperbacks: The Village Labourer, The Town Labourer.
Recommended model for action:
- Willis's Introduction to Genealogy,
- How I traced my Ancestry.