Courses starts: 19 Jan 2026
Week 1: Creating a Family Tree, and Civil Registration Records
Our introductory session will allow students to share why learning about their family history is important to them. We will discuss the various methods for compiling and preserving a family tree and the associated documentary evidence to support it, and begin our look at records themselves with a guide to using civil registration records (births, marriages, and deaths) from the present day back to 1837.
Week 2: Parish Registers and and Paleography Troubleshooting
Our second session will draw on the grounding we gained in our exploration of civil registration to move on to parish registers instead, which theoretically survive (sometimes sporadically) from 1538 onwards. We will explore how to examine digitised parish registers online, and how to locate non-digitised records in local archive catalogues. We will also spend some time working on basic paleography, because, although many records have been transcribed, the transcriptions cannot always be relied upon, and as the family historian is drawn away into earlier time periods understanding handwriting can become challenging.
Week 3: Census Records and Electoral Rolls
Our third session will explore how to trace the ancestors we have found in civil registration and parish records through the censuses of 1841 to 1921. We will learn how each different census can tell us a varying amount of information about their lives, and how we can use them as a starting point for further research. We will also explore electoral rolls, which can be used to augment the later census records and are particularly useful for tracing ancestors through the early 20th century.
Week 4: Excursion to Oxfordshire History Centre
[SUBJECT TO ARRANGEMENT] Our fourth session will be held off-site at the Oxfordshire History Centre to give students some hands-on experience of how to use an archive and the types of non-digitised records that can be found there. Although the students may not have Oxfordshire genealogy the skills learned from this trip are transferrable to any local archive they might want to visit for their research.
Week 5: Newspapers, and Next Steps
The final session will explore how to use the ever-expanding resource of digitised newspapers from across the country to flesh out the lives of our ancestors, and learn more about the places they were living. We will also discuss other pre-19th century resources not covered in the main content, so that students will be able to continue their research if they want to. We will conclude with a reflection on why family history is important.
