Belgium: A Strategy to Identify your Ancestors

This article provides a possible strategy to find your ancestors within Belgium. If you want to create a more elaborate family tree, this strategy will be insufficient.

Identifying a person

The first name and surname is not sufficient to identify a person, but what is? The first name, surname, year of birth, birthplace, year of death, place of death or any such information for a certain relative, these are data point that can help identify a person. Even though there is no consensus for this, 4 of these data points is sufficient, in most cases. Although, some common sense is advised. For example:

• If the name is common and the place is a large city, then you should have an additional data point to be certain.
• Similarly, if you know the name is very particular, then 3 data points might suffice.
• The family name of the father is not a new data point.
• If you have an exact date, that can be consider as 2 data points instead of 1.

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.

Research for the 20th century

The document dated after 1920 are not publicly available, due to privacy concerns. Documents dated between 1900 and 1920 are often unavailable as well. If you can not find the documents in the catalogues [1], you might find it in on the website of the national archive [2].
To cover this period, it should suffice to ask you family members.