Tag: online genealogy

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My best-liked technique to find elusive ancestors?

Looking at the Chief Constable s report Wolverhampton City Archives
I sometimes get asked which of the various technique for finding an elusive ancestor is the best?

Which do I most enjoy using, is it searching the many record collections online?

Or is it perhaps using a particular tool on one of the subscription sites?

The more astute readers of my blog will have noticed that I often report back from a visit to a County Record Office, or from a trip to The National Archives or some other family history library. “Ah,” they say, “You prefer to go to a record repository and root around in the records there, now don’t you?”
Well the answer is my preferred research method is…

Stop just there! Let me just think about this…

The beauty of the online records are that you can look for the elusive ancestor from the comfort of your own home. They mostly have a search engine that makes it quick and easy to locate likely candidates for you and so can cut the hours spent scrolling through microfilm, or maybe leafing through a document or a book to find that mention of your ancestor in the actual record depository.

All in one search for family history
TheGenealogist online data website 

But a County Record Office, or a local heritage archive, has a whole lot more diverse record sets for you to look through than you are going to find on any of the data websites. For example, I’m thinking of records that I’ve used to find out where the family lived at the time that they had to have their child immunised against smallpox. Or the lists that are so very local to the area and so specific that the online sites would not have sufficient demand from their subscribers to warrant the expense of digitizing them; records such as the Chief Constable’s Report that I looked through recently at the Wolverhampton City Archives. Record offices may have documents left to them by a local lawyer’s office, a firm of undertakers, or perhaps the business records of the main employer in the town.

 

Dudley Archives West Midlands
Dudley Archives, West Midlands
Visit to Wolverhampton City Archives
Visit to Wolverhampton City Archives

 

So my answer has to be:

I most enjoy using all of the above. Which ever record collection and wheresoever it may be accessed, if it gives me the answer as to where my evasive ancestor can be found, then this is the one to use and will be my current favoured technique. It is going to vary, depending on the circumstances. So I am a great fan of the online websites and I am a great advocate of visiting the many physical depositories across the land.

But how do I know what to look for? How do I know which records I should be using, once I’ve exhausted the basic ones that everyone knows about?

I had to learn about them. What to look for and where. And, do you know what? I am so glad that I did, because without the extra knowledge I would still not know where some of my more elusive ancestors had lived, worked or played.

If you are wondering where you may find your elusive English/Welsh ancestor then take the plunge. Learn more about the records and resources both online and off.

Join the many satisfied subscribers to the Family History Researcher Academy now!

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Hit a brick wall with your English/Welsh ancestors?

Learn how to discover where to find the many records and resources that will help you to find your forebears.

Join the Family History Researcher Course online.

Some links may be compensated affiliate links. See http://paidforadvertising.co.uk/

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Dick Eastman at Who Do You Think You Are? Live 2015

It was a great pleasure at this year’s show, for me as a family history blogger, to be introduced to perhaps the best known genealogy blogger of our time, Dick Eastman. Many of you will of course know of Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter and you may even have been lucky enough to catch him at the Who Do You Think You Are? Live show giving one of his several talks at the event.

I am grateful to Nigel Bayley, MD of TheGenealogist, for making the introduction as we caught up with each other in the hall at the NEC and to Dick himself for giving me his time to do this little interview.

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Learn more about English and Welsh family history resources which can be used to find your elusive ancestors with the Family History Researcher Course,

CLICK the image below:

Family History Researcher English/Welsh course

 

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Family History Books for Kindle

So this week, in the British Isles, saw Waterstones Booksellers launch the Kindle readers in their shops across the country. In my branch in St Helier, Jersey there is a great new display point and I was drawn immediately towards the Kindle Fire HD. I love the way it looks and the way it works! So much so that I got my debit card out and bought one there and then.

With these devices making more of an inroad into the way that people shop for books and read them I thought that it was timely for me to take a look at what family history titles are available from the Amazon Kindle store.

First off  I found that Peter Christian’s The Genealogist’s Internet is available. I’d seen it reviewed in Your Family Tree magazine in only the last month with a recommend that every family historian should have a copy either in Kindle form or in physical book.

It is a practical guide which that  is great for both beginners and more experienced researchers to use as it explores the most useful online sources and aids its readers to navigate each one. The Genealogist’s Internet features fully updated URLs and all of the recent developments in online genealogy.

This is the fully updated fifth edition and it carries the endorsed by the National Archives. Covering

·Online census records and wills, including the 1911 Census

·Civil registration indexes

·Information on occupations and professions

·DNA matching

·New genealogy websites and search engines

·Surname studies

·Passenger lists and migration records

·Information on digitised historical maps and photographs

Peter Christian’s book also includes the impact of blogging, podcasting and social networking on family history research, that allows the family historian to seek out others with similar research interests and so to share their results. Whether you want to put your family tree online, find distant relatives or access the numerous online genealogical forums, discussion groups and mailing lists, this book is a must-have.

For a selection of other Kindle books, including my own, head over to amazon.co.uk and take a look at these: Must Have Family History Books for your Kindle.

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ScotlandsPeople is 10 years old!

Part of my family tree extends into Scotland and when I first set out researching the family I very quickly found the really useful family history website, ScotlandsPeople.gov.uk.

Officially launched in mid-September 2002, it celebrates its tenth birthday in September 2012 as one of the first genealogy sites to arrive on the web.

Back when I began I was favourably impressed with the data available to me from ScotlandsPeople, such as being able to dowload images from the Old Parish Records at a time when no English parish registers were online. The site now contains over 90 million digital records and corresponding images, and adds new sets of fully-searchable historical records on a regular basis.

With over one million registered users from across the world, the website remains the biggest online resource for Scottish census, birth, marriage and death records. The website has evolved through a decade of huge technological growth and in a time where interest in genealogy has soared.

Chris van der Kuyl, the CEO of brightsolid, the company that enables ScotlandsPeople for the National Records of Scotland, said:
‘ScotlandsPeople was our first ever family history website, and our partnership with the National Records of  Scotland has undoubtedly enabled brightsolid to expand our business to become one of the world’s leading publishers of online genealogy.

‘When the Scotlandspeople website was launched back in 2002, we were truly leading the way, offering a unique online product for family historians. We are immensely proud of how ScotlandsPeople has evolved over the last decade. We continue to add exciting new data sets and innovative search techniques to the site, making family history research easier and more accessible around the globe.’

George MacKenzie, Registrar General and the Keeper at the National Records of Scotland, said:

‘ScotlandsPeople has gone from strength to strength since its launch ten years ago. I am delighted that in our special birthday year we’ll be enhancing this very popular resource for Scottish family history by adding hundreds of thousands of new wills from 1902 to 1925.’

As well as the website, that can be accessed worldwide, if you visit Edinburgh then you will have the chance to visit the ScotlandsPeople Centre which is Scotland’s largest family history centre. It can be found at the east end of Princes Street opposite the Balmoral Hotel.

Opening hours are 09:00 to 16:30 on weekdays for £15 per day or free non-bookable two hour introductory sessions from 10:00 to 12:00 and 14:00 to 16:00.

Over the years brightsolid, the company behind the ScotlandsPeople website has expanded and now also owns Genes Reunited and Find My Past.

 

 

The websites that I am using the most at the moment are Find My Past and The Genealogist.co.uk. To take your family history further I highly recommend that you too consider a subscription to these websites. Take a look now and see what great data sets they have to offer:

 

The Genealogist - UK census, BMDs and more online


Disclosure: The Links in the above are Compensated Affiliate links. If you click on them then I may be rewarded by Findmypast.co.uk or The Genealogist.co.uk should you sign up for their subscriptions.

 

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