How to start searching for your ancestors

1.    Collect information from your family especially any birth, marriage and/or death certificates.

2.    If you are missing dates go to the Tauranga Public Library, the NZ room and search for the birth, marriage or death information in the NZ records.

3.    If you have family in England and/or Wales in 1881 go to www.familysearch.org and from the list on the left side, click census. On the next screen enter the name, year of birth and allow 2 or 5 years optional search if you don’t have an exact date, no need to fill all the boxes.  On the next screen a list of people will come up, check names from the known area.  If you do get a match, click and you will then see their name, age, address, occupation and place of birth. Across to the right of this page click on the word ‘household’ to show all the people at that address on the night of the census, often a great page to find siblings.

4.    Now go back to the first screen of familysearch and from the left hand column, just below ‘census’ click on International Genealogical Index ( IGI for short)  and then try and obtain birth, marriage and/or death information about the family. Note that not all parish information is available on this site so you might not find the information.

5.    For Scottish information try the free site www.scotsfind.org or the more comprehensive Government site www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/  You will need to register to search their lists and then pay to download any of the  information.  For UK and Ireland information try www.genuki.org.uk/, then click on the icon in top left corner ‘United Kingdom and Ireland’..

6.    Interested?  Join the local genealogy group, monthly meetings, phone Allison Hacking 549 5556 or Carole Ansley 552 0925

7.    Look at www.titles.co.nz/katikatigenealogy.htm   to see our members surnames, towns and areas of interest.