Family Ancestry

John King, DOB: 1805?

I have been researching my Family Tree and got back to John King who was born about 1805 (estimated from age of 36 stated on 1841 census)I know obviously that fathers surname was King but I do not know his first name. I know mothers name was Sarah but I do not know her maiden name. The earliest census available is 1841 to that’s no good now. I am now stuck with what I can do as can’t find anymore information on ancestry.com etc.

My Family History stops at about the same date (1801) with a blacksmith in Little Cornard, Suffolk. The problem is that prior to this time no census records were collected and the parish records have almost all been destroyed, lost or they were never kept in the first place. The 1801 census was the first real attempt at collecting this kind of information (and even that was often incomplete and unreliable).

Those people who can go back further in time are relying on other types of information – Army records, workhouse records, legal records, hospital records, business accounts, shipping records and so on. But in order to research this kind of thing you have to know exactly who, when and where the record applies to – in other words, there needs to be a family tradition that says something like “great, great, great grandfather Samuel emigrated to Canada in the late 18th century”, or a distant female relative gave birth to triplets while pretending to be a male soldier in 1758 – something along those lines.

Without these clues you have very little hope of getting any further back (unless of course your ancestors were nobility, when research becomes a doddle).