Acknowledgements

2.  freebmd - stands for Free Births, Marriages, and Deaths

I first used freebmd and checked out the people whose bmd details I was sure of.  For example, I searched Births in Chesterfield for Pollie Millington (born in 1904).  The results in general seemed to be correct to within a year or two.  Make sure that you note your query and copy the results in their entirety – it is best to cut and paste the relevant rows from the results – so that you can come back to them later.  This example, which includes a search for the marriages of Pollie's father, Charles Millington, will enable you to search for your own family.

See Appendix 1: sample search using freebmd

Please note that this free site relies on volunteer transcribers. It is continually updated and is not complete as yet, especially with respect to 20th century records. (The official births, marriages and deaths site which is up to date is at www.1837online.com but the information there is not free as we shall see later).  Also, as the sample shows, freebmd and similar software only recover isolated bmd events and we have to establish how they are related.  Even the spouse of a given person has to be deduced. 

3.  Interviews

I then (video) interviewed people to check the information and drew up a family tree, using a table in Microsoft Word (Appendix 0a).  This highlighted the gaps and the data which needed to be checked out.   The finished family tree can be drawn up using other tools as we shall see later.