What Are Guardianship Records and How Can They Help Trace Family Lines?
Guardianship records are the legal documents that relate to the appointment of an adult as a guardian responsible for caring for someone unable to do so themselves, typically an underage minor. Most guardianship records relate to children who have lost at least one parent.
However, some guardianship records can also relate to adults considered mentally or physically incapable of managing their own legal property with the guardian appointed to manage their affairs.
Guardianship records can help trace family lines by confirming relationships that might not be recorded in other documents, such as step-parent relationships, and can confirm information like death dates, property ownership, and maiden names.
What Is Guardianship?
Today, most legal guardianship involves an adult taking physical custody of a child. It’s important to note that this wasn’t always the case historically as guardians may have focused on overseeing property and legal affairs instead. Although a guardian was often a close family member, a neighbor or another court-appointed adult can also be assigned guardianship.
What’s in a Guardianship Record?
Guardianship records can help provide context for your family tree and specific relationships, particularly those that aren’t documented in census records or other government documents.
While guardianship records have changed with time, these legal documents will typically include the initial petition for guardianship, the names, and ages of the children, wards, and guardians, including any relationship they have with each other.
As well as providing context for family structures, guardianship records can also include financial information, including land ownership and estate value. This petition will also include an explanation for the guardianship, whether it’s the death of a parent or if they’ve become mentally incapacitated and are no longer able to care for their child.
Guardianship records can help confirm information like death dates and provide a social context to your family tree, especially if a neighbor was named as guardian, instead of a close family member.
How Guardianship Records Can Help Trace Family Lines
Guardianship records can help fill in the blanks within specific parts of your family tree, from confirming death dates to uncovering underage children who may not have been documented in census records or named in a will. Orphaned children, particularly younger siblings, are often missed if the family moved away following the death of their parents or if they were sent away to live with another relative.
These records are often invaluable when trying to pinpoint exactly when a family member migrated or moved to another location. They can also bridge the gap to property records and other historical documents you can use to find ancestors, particularly when there are non-traditional family dynamics.
They can also confirm the existence of half-siblings or step-siblings as guardianship records may include references to other minors in the care of the guardian. It’s also possible to identify previously unknown relatives, such as aunts, cousins, or uncles, who assume a guardianship role.
Where to Find Guardianship Records
Probate records are the best starting point for finding guardianship records as they will typically include the naming of a guardian for an orphaned child, whether by the court itself or a parent’s will.
Depending on the period you’re focusing on, you may be able to find a digital record of a will. For example, you can search our index of wills and probates from England and Wales for 1853-1943 on MyHeritage.
Older wills were typically held by the Church of England, becoming known as the Canterbury wills, which have also been reproduced on MyHeritage with records dating back to 1384.
Guardianship records often contain multiple legal documents, from probate records to the initial petition of guardianship and even adoption records. Local courthouses and state archives may contain unindexed documents that aren’t available online. Not all children had formal guardianships, so these documents can help fill in the blanks, especially if probate records are incomplete.
Trace Your Family Tree with MyHeritage
At MyHeritage, we help you trace your family tree by identifying guardianship records to add context to your family relationships, including finding orphaned children that may have been missed by census records. Are you searching for guardianship records to confirm your family tree? Read our guide on why orphan and adoption records are key to uncovering missing ancestors.
Lloyd de Vere Hunt
May 29, 2025
This is very true. My 4th ggf and his siblings became wards of their uncles at a young age when their parents divorced in 1770.
This creates a need for considerable paperwork for their entire young lives and possibly found in several different jurisdictions. It also may require conflicting interests among the children as I discovered. Even the legal documents may reflect deeply the humanity of the situation.
One of the most important pieces of correspondence from George and Uncle Dietrich was from the palace of Frederick the Great to Strutele Mansion, Tukums from 1783. It was recently discovered envelope and all by my cousin in the Riga Archives and arrived as a birthday gift this year fully and artfully translated.
The nature of the letter was was required was a settling of accounts from if he and his brother’s terms as page and gearing up for officer’s training.
Why was this letter so important to me. It seems that in his later adulthood in London, he had become one of Edmond, Lord Byng the long serving head of the colonial office. Ever time that his godson, the later satirist Edmond Hodgson Yates and his friends, he always insisted that they go and visit George.
After George’s death and close to his own, Yates wrote his Recollections absolutely laughing at being referred to as de (proof in the British Library) or von (proof all over the place) and even so proposterous that it was said that he had been page to Frederick the Great.
Oddly enough on reading this my own family not exposed to the documentary whirlwind which he was also wondered a lot
So this was game, set and finally match – along with a lot of the help including MyHeritage where I began my adventure and seems to be endless.
One final bit of advice. Such documents do reveal the ultimate in humanity. You will feel the virtual reality of it all as you never did before