family records
Lineage paper trail
Family records are documents preserving information about a family's history—birth certificates, marriage licenses, death records, wills, photographs, letters, and genealogical charts.
The term often appears in contexts of ancestry research or estate planning: She found her great-grandmother's immigration papers among the family records.
Family records may be kept privately or deposited with archives and genealogical societies.
- birth certificatesDocuments proving nativity
- photographsLight-captured images
- death certificatesOfficial records of demise
- ship manifestsLists of vessel contents
- ancestryFamily line of descent
heirlooms · letter · ethnic heritage · oral histories · diaries · lineage · naturalization papers · land deeds · wills · cultural identity · descendants · pedigree · marriage licenses · historical archives · primary sources · court documents · dusty · forebears
- family recordsbirth certificates, birth certificate, death certificate, marriage license, death certificates
- ancestryancestors, kinship, ancestor, clan, ancestry
- memoirsmemoir, memoirs, autobiography, autobiographies, life story
- social servicessocial workers, social work, social services, welfare office, case workers
- genealogydescendants, ancestors, ancestry tracing, pedigrees, lineages
- Greek genealogylineage, bloodline, ancestry, heritage, descent
family recordspublic records
Officially filed, publicly accessible documents
government records · official records · state archives · national archives · church records
family recordscensus data
Collected demographic statistics
public records · population statistics · demographic data · national archives · government records
family recordsofficial documents
Verified governmental or institutional papers
government archives · state archives · court records · legal records · public archives