Who Do You Think You Are? Encyclopedia of Genealogy: The definitive reference guide to tracing your family history

Emily Sherwood

Sarah Sherwood b. 1645.

Faye Sherwood unm.

This pedigree explains that James Sherwood married Alice Clarke and had four children, John, George, Sarah and Faye. John married Jane Cecily but he died without children. George married Carole Vine and had three children named Simon, Joseph and Emily. These were therefore James Sherwood’s grandchildren. His grandchild Joseph Sherwood married Mary Shanks in 1699 and died in 1722 leaving two daughters, Katherine and Grace, who would have been James Sherwood’s great-grandchildren.

Irrespective of what style of family tree you eventually decide to use, it will hopefully grow too big for your original piece of paper, so you will probably need to break the tree into sections to make it more manageable. While it is nice to have your entire family tree on one piece of paper, you should be constantly referring to it to help organize your research, and for this reason it usually makes more sense to break it down into smaller branches, perhaps with your paternal side on one tree and maternal side on another. Some people find that smaller trees of individual generations are useful for taking to archives. These can then be updated regularly and annotated while you are in the archives, and the new information transferred to your master family tree at a convenient time.

Abbreviations in Family Trees

Here are some examples of words and abbreviations used specifically in family trees:

b. born

m. or mar. married = married

2. second marriage

d. died

ob. or obit. died

d.s.p. or o.s.p. died childless

d.v.p. or o.v.p. died before father

1. left descendants

bapt. or bp. baptized

chr. christened

bur. buried

lic. licence (marriage licence)

MI monumental inscription

c. circa or about

? uncertain or unknown

o.t.p. of this parish

w. wife

s. son

s. and h. son and heir

dau. daughter

g.f. grandfather

g.m. grandmother

g.g.f. great-grandfather

g.g.m. great-grandmother

inf. infant

spin. spinster (unmarried woman)

bach. bachelor (unmarried man)

unm. unmarried

div. divorced

wid. widow (a woman whose husband has died)

wdr. widower (a man whose wife has died)

mat. maternal or female side of the family

pat. paternal or male side of the family

Distaff female side of the family

Spear male side of the family

Online Family Trees

Online family trees and family tree software packages are extremely helpful to collate your tree in its entirety so that you can share it with other family members, and to organize the end product of your research. Using these resources saves you the effort of constantly rewriting a large family tree if you run out of space or make mistakes, because you can easily log onto your electronic tree and edit the details as needed. Most genealogy software now saves your family tree and genealogical data as a GEDCOM file, which stands for Genealogical Data Communications. This has been created to make sharing your tree easier, regardless of the software you use.

SUMMARY

The important components of a comprehensive family tree are:

• Names, including Christian or forename, surname, maiden name and any nicknames

• Dates of birth, marriage and death

• Place of birth, marriage, death and abode

• Occupation