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, but it can be used to build a framework.

Identifying a person
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:


 * 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 that the name is very particular, then 3 data points might suffice.
 * Obviously, the family name of the father is not a new data point, since it is always the same as the family name of the child.
 * If you have an exact date, that can be considered 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 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 catalogues, you might find it in on the website of the national archive.

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

Research for the 19th century
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.

The birth certificate contains information about the parents: the name, age and, if you are lucky, the town of origin. This makes it possible to find their birth certificate. The older records might not contain the town of origin or even the age. There are many ways to work around this problem.

If you are lucky, the parents married in the same village as their child was born. The marriage certificate contains information about the bride and groom, but also about their parents. Most importantly, it locates their death or, if they are still alive, it gives the residence. In the later case, they are likely do die within the following decade in that village. Either way, you can easily find their death certificate. The death certificate contains the age, town of origin and the name of the parents, which makes it possible to find the birth certificate.

A more secure approach is to search for the marriage certificate of the ancestors for whom you already have the birth certificate. They likely married in the birth town of the wife. The marriage certificate helps to locate the death certificate of the parents, which helps to locate their birth certificate. It is also possible to search for the death certificate directly, but then you might have to search through multiple decades.

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

Research for the 17th and 18th century
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.

Now, suppose you have a long list of potential siblings. Next, you should look for potential matches. Find the baptism record of someone with the same name and see if people in the list show up as relatives of the potential match.

As this work can be labour intensive, it is a good idea to check if anyone else has done it. A lot of this research can be found on geneanet. Other peoples research can help you find primary sources, but do not just copy their work.

Research for the 16th century and earlier
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.

Extra tips and remarks

 * 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.
 * The civil registration was introduced during the French revolution, the earliest records used the calendar of the French republic, which is completely different from the Gregorian calender.
 * You can introduce dates from the calender of the French republic into the family tree, a translation to the Gregorian calender will be proposed as standardized date.
 * Not all documents are in the same language. The first names are often translated to the language of the text.
 * Add sources. This will take some time at first, but makes it easy to check later.