Question/answer » How does a family historian get all that information?

A family tree with hundreds of names, dates and places: where does it all come from? None of it is secret. A researcher collects it piece by piece from sources that anyone may use.

Public archives

• Civil registration: records of births, marriages and deaths, since 1811. They become public after 100, 75 and 50 years.
• Church registers: registers of baptisms, marriages and burials from before 1811, often hundreds of years old.
• Population registers: who lived where, with whom, and what his or her occupation was.
• Other sources: notarial deeds, old newspapers, military registers, gravestones, memorial cards.

Archives have put many of these sources online. On websites such as Open Archives a researcher searches by name and finds the records. Genealogy Online helps with this through the Scans search service.

The family itself

Everything about the last generations comes from people. From parents, uncles and aunts, from a marriage booklet in a drawer, from photos with names on the back. A researcher talks to family and writes down what they tell. So data about living persons always comes from the family, never from an archive.

Showing sources

A good researcher states for every fact where it comes from. In a family tree on Genealogy Online you see those sources next to the person. That way you can check for yourself whether something is correct. Read more about the rules for good research.

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