Belgium Research Tips and Strategies

Belgium Research Strategies

 * A Strategy to Identify your Ancestors
 * Record Finder: a summary to know where to find information.
 * A Guide to find the Town of Origin for migrants from Belgium.

Belgium Research Tips

 * Do not rush back in time. It takes time before you get used to the handwriting of older texts. If you go back too quickly, the documents will be difficult to read.
 * Not all documents are in the same language. The first names are often translated into the language of the text.
 * 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 calendar.
 * Add sources. This takes a few seconds at first, but makes it easy to check later. Each record contains a lot of information, some of it might interest you in the future.

Tips for Finding Your Ancestor in the Records

 * Effective use of civil registration and church records includes the following strategies:
 * 1) Identify your ancestor by finding his birth or christening record.
 * 2) When you find an ancestor’s birth or baptismal record, search for the births of siblings.
 * 3) Search for the parents’ marriage record. Typically, the marriage took place one or two years before the oldest child was born.
 * 4) Search for the parents' birth records. On the average, people married in their early 20s, so subtact 25 or so years from the marriage date for a starting year to search for the parents' birth records.
 * 5) Search the death registers for all family members.
 * 6) If you do not find earlier generations in the parish registers, search neighboring parishes.


 * Marriages were usually performed and recorded where the bride lived.
 * Do not overlook the importance of death records. Death records are especially helpful because they may provide important information about a person’s birth, spouse, and parents. Civil death records often exist for individuals for whom there are no birth or marriage records.