As a genealogist and probate researcher, I come across a lot of people who are interested in researching their family history but don’t know where to begin. While research can sometimes be tricky, and every family is different, there are a number of free, simple steps you can take to get started.

Interviewing your relatives is by far the most effective way of gathering knowledge quickly as you start to build your family tree.  You can often discover tons of information going back several generations with just a quick chat.  However, as with all research, there are ways and means of going about this in order to get the most out of it.

A decade ago when I began researching my own Jewish ancestry, an elderly relative sent me a scuffed piece of paper with a list of unfamiliar names.  These, I was told, were my great-grandfather’s siblings – the LEWKOWICZ family – from Lodz, Poland.  Then, I knew little more than my great-grandfather’s name and that he had died aged 52 in Kensington Infirmary, of tuberculosis aggravated by his tailoring work.

For a variety of reasons, I am regularly commissioned to find missing people in my work at Research Roots. When someone has died, I may be asked by a solicitor or accountant dealing with probate to find someone named in a will or, when no will exists, to construct a family tree and locate surviving beneficiaries to an estate.  We may even have contacted you as a possible beneficiary.

Curiously, the pressure on British Jews to assimilate seems to have been at the expense of their Jewish identity in a way that it was not amongst their cousins in the US.  While one of the challenges of researching Jewish families all over the world is the habitual translation and adoption of new names, American Jews seem to have maintained closer ties to their previous identities.

Finding the right researcher to investigate your family tree is not necessarily an easy task.  Professional genealogists are few and far between, and it can be difficult to know whether someone has the expertise, interests and communication skills you need.  

I am prompted to write this post thanks to a recent run of what us family history dorks sometimes call ‘genealogical serendipity’. This will perhaps ring most bells with more experienced family historians but it has relevance for beginners too.

Researching immigrant Jewish ancestors can be much harder in the UK than it is in the US, or in certain other countries. Historic UK immigration records are relatively few and far between and we have no real equivalent of the extensive Castle Garden/ Ellis Island databases and other American port records.