- Gather together all the information you can from your own
family ie names, dates of birth, marriage and death, where
they lived and what jobs they did
- Collate all the details you have to date and draw up a
family tree
- Find out if anyone else has researched your family or
name through a local Family History Society
eg Suffolk Family
History Society or the Guild
of One Name Studies
- Decide which part of your family you are going to trace
first, rather than going off in several different directions at
once
- Go to your nearest Suffolk Record Office for help and advice on
which records to use:
How to use the Suffolk Record Office
Things to remember:
- always keep a record of the source of each
item of information and details of those records searched without
success as you go along
- at certain times people either lied about their age, or
couldn't remember when they were born eg they lied to join the Army
or get married
- the spelling of a name could be different as the Registrar
or Vicar would write down what he thought was the correct
spelling of a name. Local accents can also create variations
eg Wolf, Woolf, Wolfe and Woulfe
- families may have baptised several children at the same time so
the child could be anything from a few days old to a teenager
- people re-create the truth on occasion, either deliberately or
because they don't know the truth eg an illegitimate child
registered at birth with the mother's surname but uses
the step-father's surname although no formal change of
name or adoption ever took place
- in the early years not all events, particularly births, were
registered
- nicknames may be used eg Sandy for Alexander or
Harry for Henry etc. People often used a middle name as a
forename.
- sometimes the parents may register a child with one set of
forenames but then have them baptised as something different
- the General Register Office index shows the registration
district where the event was registered, which is not
necessarily where the event occurred
- the numbers in the birth, marriage and death references
are only useful to the General Register Office, they are not
relevant to the way information is kept in the local Register
Office Indexes. For example the area 4A covers most of
Suffolk!
Ancestry Library
Edition provides genealogical information with more than
five billion names in over 4000 collections. NB: only
available in Suffolk libraries and Suffolk Record Office
If you do not have time to visit your local Suffolk Record Office,
our expert staff can carry out
research for you for a fee.
Back to
Suffolk Record Office