1 way to smash a genealogical brick wall

Have you hit a brick wall in your family history research? Does it fill you with despair and frustration? If so, professional researcher Chris Paton is here to help, describing how brick walls can be as much of an opportunity as they can a hindrance...

What is a genealogy brickwall?

A genealogical brick wall is simply a research problem that has yet to be overcome, for brick walls in fact lie at the very heart of the stories that we are trying to uncover. Genealogy and family history research is about problem solving, and the thrill of the hunt in so doing.

Why have you got a brickwall?

It might well be that your brick wall issue is a genuine blockage with little hope of bypassing it - the records needed to resolve it may not have survived, for example.

However, more often than not it might also be the case that the tricky situation causing the obstacle on your tree has nothing to do with the records at all, and absolutely everything to do with you!

A top genealogy brickwall-smashing tip from Chris Paton: Explore errors & omissions

Take birth, marriage and death records in England and Wales, for example. The conventional wisdom for researching these tells us that civil registration in the two countries commenced in July 1837, and that from this point it should be possible to locate such events initially from the published General Register Office (GRO) indexes, from which we can then order up certificates.

So, if this is the case, why might it be that an event can suddenly not be found in the indexes?

There could well be a few reasons.

1. Are you aware that the GRO indexes, for example, were actually created as a secondary part of the registration process? Initially the records were compiled by local registrars across the two countries, and then copies conveyed by superintendent registrars every three months to the centralised GRO. When copies were made, inevitably sometimes errors were introduced, and some items were overlooked.

What's the solution?

To overcome this issue, it is well worth trying to find the same record from the original superintendent registrar's office, rather than the GRO.

A useful starting point is to visit the UKBMD website at www.ukbmd.org.uk/local_bmd, where you can identify if local indexes have been created for a particular area and made available online.

If so, records can then be duly ordered.

While coverage for death registration was almost complete, even from the early days of civil registration -– with a death certificate formally required before any burial could take place - it is estimated that about 5% of births may never have been registered prior to 1875. In such a case, you may need to turn to locally generated records instead. (For instance burials, memorial inscriptions, newspaper notices etc).

How to find further advice for working on your genealogy brickwalls

Chris Paton's article on brickwalls was published in the June 2026 issue of Family Tree. Brickwalls aren't ever going to go away - and will remain part of the genealogy landscape forever! That said, that doesn't mean that some of them aren't solvable, and that we shouldn't keep persevering.

In the Spring of 2025 we are delighted to be running a series of presentations by family historian Mike Gould as part of the Family Tree Brickwalls, Skills & Solutions Club programme. 

Find details of the first of the three parts here: https://www.family-tree.co.uk/how-to-guides/webinars/presentation-how-to-solve-brickwalls-in-the-1800s-with-mike-gould-20/ - we'd love you to join us for this online event on Thursday 20th February at 1pm.

The two subsequent online learning sessions will take place in March and April 2025 and will cover pre-1800 and the 1900s respectively. Any queries, please email [email protected]