Belgium: A Strategy to Identify your Ancestors: Difference between revisions

The first name and surname is not sufficient to identify a person, but what is? Any record might contain someone's first name, surname, year of birth, birthplace, year of death, place of death or any such information of a relative. These are data points that can help identify a person. There is no consensus what is sufficient, but for this article we will suppose that 4 such data points are sufficient. Although, some common sense is advised. For example:

When, there is a data point that is conflicting, that does not mean there is no match. People can change their name, the age might be wrong by a couple of years, ... Although, you do need some additional data points to confirm this.

The documents dated after 1920 are not publicly available, due to privacy concerns and documents dated between 1900 and 1920 are often unavailable as well. If you can not find the documents in the [https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog '''catalogues'''], you might find it in on the website of the [https://search.arch.be '''national archive'''].

To cover this period, it should suffice to ask you family members.

To find your ancestors for this period, it suffices to use the documents in the civil register. Suppose you found the birth certificate of an ancestor.

You can also search for the birth certificates of the sibling. This can help estimate the marriage and death dates of the parents.

During this era the civil register did not yet exist. However, the church has similar record, that is records of baptism, marriage and burials. These records can contain even fewer information. The records for marriages and burial rarely contain information about the parents. Although, the baptism and marriage records contain godparents and witnesses, which are often relatives. Given the baptism record of an ancestor, you can proceed by collecting all baptism records of their siblings. If you can only find a few sibling, then either one of the parents died young or the parents remarried, either way you can search for an other marriage of the parents. Note that people often remarried within the year.

There are no church records for this era. It might be possible to go back further by looking at notarial records, court records, orphanage records and Naturalization records, but there is no clear strategy here.

*Do not rush back in time. It takes time before you get used to the handwriting of older texts. If you go back to quickly, the documents will be difficult to read.