How do you find out your family membs in the middle ages?

Answer 1

You can only do that if your family is descended directly from the nobility, meaning that you are a member of a wealthy aristocratic family today with history going back almost a thousand years.

If you are a current member of the Fitzwalter family (for example) who owned huge estates in Kent and elsewhere until fairly recently, you can easily trace your family line back to the fitz Walters of the 12th and 13th centuries.

If your name is Brown (for example) and you come from a long line of Yorkshire miners, you definitely have no chance at all of tracing your ancestry back much before 1801 (the year of the first UK census). Even getting that far back in history is difficult, since those early census records are incomplete - parish records of births, deaths and marriages are even worse and in many cases the records were simply not kept.

There is an additional problem regarding surnames of non-nobles - these simply did not exist during much of the medieval period. People were known by their trade (for example: Wat Tyler, who worked on roofs), their place of birth (for example Ralph of Coggishall), their personal appearance (for example William Black - meaning black-haired), or most commonly by their relationship (for example Robert son of Hugh the dyer). These names were not passed on to sons so they are not surnames: Hugh Dyer's son Robert might have become a cloth merchant and might therefore be Robert Mercer, son of Hugh Dyer.

Tracing a family history through this chaos would be impossible.