No wonder we can't find our ancestors

[LizzieW]

And searching through baptisms in parish registers recently, I've noticed quite a few that just say "baby (or girl/boy) parents unknown" so who they were no-one will ever know.  I suppose if you had an ancestor that you thought was born/baptised in a particular area in a particular year, you could trawl through the records to see if an unknown one shows up.

[Mavals]

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Many of them are in the custody of private individuals, and of other bodies like universities , which can often restrict physical access, and then there are the problems of transcribing and reading the records.
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I heard an interesting talk at WDYTYA LIVE where the presenter, facing a similar problem, used a Freedom of Information request to gain access to documents held by a university. On arrival at the university in question he was met by the archivist who congratulated him on using this method to open up the information to public scrutiny. So dont accept a refusal to make a record available a without a challenge!

[GrahamSimons]

If you are hugely lucky you have an ancestor in the parish records of Perlethorpe, which antedate the Thomas Cromwell registers by ten years. Sadly my family connection to the village is 20th not 16th century.
There are some interesting studies which take you much further back, see
http://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php/topic,638384.msg4854163.html#msg4854163
for example. However I have a family legend of the "fought at the Battle of Hastings" variety and bought the book My Ancestor Came over with the Conqueror - and had a pretty disappointing time reading it as there seems to be remarkably little evidence of who was on the field of battle.
But then other people seem to vanish into thin air even in the 20th century - even people with very unusual names! [Has anyone spotted the wonderfully-named Rodolf Francis Joseph Kinsky Symons FitzSimon, born 1883, last seen in the 1911 census, by the way? Yes, it is one man with enough Christian names for a whole family!]

[LizzieW]

Freedom of Information request to gain access to documents held by a university. On arrival at the university in question he was met by the archivist who congratulated him on using this method to open up the information to public scrutiny. So dont accept a refusal to make a record available a without a challenge!

I tried that with Manchester Archives when I wanted a copy of my g.uncle's papers from his stay in an asylum.  They still wouldn't budge quoting the 100 year rule, which as he didn't die until 1964, means I'll be 123 if I'm still alive.   Eventually, they agreed to send me his admission page which was dated more than 100 years ago.  I don't see the logic of not releasing his records, as the poor man went into the asylum in 1907 and, as far as I know, stayed there until 1964 when he died.  He was a single man, no children, his 5 siblings are long dead (in fact he outlived them all), as are all the children of his 5 siblings, so I am of the next generation and I can't believe they think anyone today will be upset by the records of a man who went into the asylum 106 years ago and died nearly 50 years ago.

Lizzie

[Redroger]

 I think Lizzie that it is a case of authority in general being ultra cautious, even when the documents in question are most unlikely to harm anyone. This same paranoic caution pervades the National Archives at Kew where some documents from WW1 and certainly from WW2 are closed in excess of 100 years, and in some cases permanently. There is also the situation where some documents are released and redacted, in effect censored. If they are to be censored then why go to the trouble of releasing them. Though I take some satisfaction in seeing authority make itself look as ridiculous as it sometimes seems.

Regarding the 100 year closure on the census, America has just released the 1940 census, if I were American I could read about myself, but I shall be 112 before I get the chance (Just possible but extremely unlikely). America hasn't collapsed because it releases its census early, so why should the UK?

[pinefamily]

Roger and Lizzie, I have just been reading this thread. Just be thankful you are not tracing Australian ancestors; apart from a couple of early ones, most Australian censuses have been destroyed after the data was extracted. Even today, the last two have had a box to tick if you want your own record kept for posterity. So only some will survive.

[LizzieW]

And I understand you're not allowed to see birth, marriage and death certs in Australia for some long time (50 years or is it more?) after the event. 

[pinefamily]

Not sure on that one; it probably differs from state to state, like so many things do. However, I do know it is virtually impossible to get a certificate other than your own, without jumping through so many hoops. Even to get my own father's death certificate from nearly 40 years ago I would have to virtually provide a DNA sample (just joking). 

[Redroger]

Without checking my source (forget what it was) I believe Lizzie is right on this one.