Who Do You Think You Are? Encyclopedia of Genealogy: The definitive reference guide to tracing your family history

Archives

In addition to the commercial organizations, major archives around the British Isles also give online access to digital copies of some of the documents in their holdings – though of course hard copies can still be ordered if you prefer. Therefore if you cannot get to these archives very easily you may be able to access some material from home. The types of records available from each archive’s website varies widely; for example, The National Archives’ website has a Documents Online area where you can pay to view copies of wills from medieval times to the mid-nineteenth century, as well as many military and naval documents, and you can order images of specific document references that are emailed to you using the online Digital Express facility. In contrast, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland does not yet enable any access to its holdings over the Internet. It is worth checking the websites of both the national and local archives that cover the regions your family were from to see if they have digital collections of any of their holdings, though this should not be considered a substitute to visiting the archives. Despite the growth in online availability, the bulk of the documents you’ll need will almost certainly have to be viewed on-site.

Newspaper Collections

It’s not just archives that are putting their holdings online. Online newspaper archives are increasingly useful for family historians, helping you to locate articles about your ancestors that may otherwise have never been found. It is always worth checking the local newspaper that covered the area your family lived in if you have a date of birth, marriage or death for a prominent ancestor that may have warranted a mention in the personal announcements or obituaries section. In the majority of cases you will still be required to visit the local library or county record office or go to the British Newspaper Library in north London to scroll through the original chronological records.

The most important records are the digitized collections of national newspapers, many of which can be searched by keyword, article type and date range. The Times is one of the most prominent of these; its collections are available online from 1785 to the present day. To access the entire collection of The Times an InfoTrac database connection is needed, to which most major archives and local library networks provide free access. Your local library may be able to give you a PIN number and instructions about how to use the database for free from home. The Scotsman also has an online database of its backdated editions from 1817 to 1950, accessed at http://archive.scotsman.com, and the historic archive of the London, Edinburgh and Belfast Gazettes can be searched and viewed for free at www.gazettes-online.co.uk.

Local newspapers tend to be more fruitful when searching for newspaper articles for the majority of our ancestors, but you may be surprised to locate an entry in a national newspaper in the form of criminal reports, court summaries, advertisements, changes of name and address notices, in addition to the many birth, marriage, death and funeral announcements and obituaries they contain. These ever-growing online newspaper archives are so useful to modern genealogists purely because they enable us to find articles about our ancestors by name rather than by searching through months’ or even years’ worth of original newspaper reports.

Portal Websites

There are numerous professional bodies in the field of genealogy that are at hand to aid you in your quest to find as much material as you can about your heritage, and most of the larger organizations attempt to do this as best they can via the web so that they reach the widest group of people. The Federation of Family History Societies (FFHS) has a Research Tips section on its website www.ffhs.org.uk, and the Society of Genealogists’ website www.sog.org.uk has genealogy leaflets that can be downloaded giving general advice about how best to go about tracing your roots. Many of the major archives also have subject-related research guides on their websites that guide you through locating and interpreting documents when at these institutions. One of the best places to find out more about the key resources you’ll be using is at www.familyrecords.gov.uk, which describes civil registration indexes, census returns, wills and probate documents and other material.

HOW TO …

… make the most of the Internet

If you are not an experienced computer and Internet user, it is probably worth investing in a good guide, like Peter Christian’s The Genealogist’s Internet or How To Trace Your Family History on the Internet published by Reader’s Digest. These books provide detailed explanations of how to research each aspect of family history using online resources and will guide you through the most popular sites. They also suggest a good range of websites for your online research.

GENUKI

GENUKI is a web-based charitable organization that offers information on all aspects of genealogy in the UK and Ireland. Its database of information and links is organized geographically and by theme on the www.genuki.org.uk website. While this site provides links to many other websites where you can seek help with any problems, the website itself aims to serve its users as a ‘virtual reference library’ and is not designed to answer specific research questions. It is supported by the FFHS and its member societies, who collaborate with GENUKI to provide them with much of the information contained on the site. It is therefore extremely useful for locating rare online indexes and transcriptions for records held in local archives that cannot be found on some of the large commercial dataset sites. As soon as you can pin a branch of your ancestors to one particular place, it is definitely worth visiting the GENUKI website because its sophisticated geographic index will show you all the key online tools and organizations that specialize in that area. Its topographical index is just as useful if there is a certain genealogical subject you are struggling with.

Cyndi’s List

Cyndi’s List is a web-based directory to help you find websites relevant to all areas of family history. Established by Cyndi Howells in 1996, Cyndi’s List is an excellent finding aid for genealogists, giving you links to thousands of useful websites. Go to www.cyndislist.com and search the Categories to find a website for whichever area of your research you need help with.

Network Websites

The benefits of data-sharing websites, where you can upload your family tree and search other researchers’ entries to find common ancestors, have been explored in Chapter 2, but there are other types of websites which help you to share and learn from other people’s research and expertise by posting messages about a specific ancestor, branch or topic of interest and awaiting responses from other users. Forums and chat rooms are particularly good for this purpose, and you will find that many sites with access to datasets also provide a forum for their members to communicate by.

Forums

Forums are great for accessing as many people with a like-minded interest as possible. If there is a family myth that you have been unable to unravel, it is possible that posting a message in a subject-related forum will attract replies from people who may be able to help, either because they have faced a similar scenario in their research, or perhaps because they recognize the names as some of their own ancestors. This way, if a family story has been passed down more than one branch distant cousins may be able to embellish with more detail about what they have heard and you can compare the two versions of events. Place your query in a forum category that best fits the subject of your enquiry, and be as specific as possible, mentioning the names you are interested in finding out more about and any relevant places and dates so that other users will be able to tell straight away if they can help you.

The British Genealogy website has links to forums covering all topics and counties at www.british-genealogy.com/forums, but also you should remember to look out for a forum section on the other websites mentioned in this book. The more forums you post your query in, the more likely you are to get a response.

Communities and Mailing Lists

The Internet is home to a range of online communities that are worth joining in order to communicate with other people who are equally as enthusiastic about their research as you. Being part of a community that has an interest in a genealogical subject you are really passionate about gives you access to a goldmine of knowledge. Whenever you are stuck you can turn to your online community and ask them for their help or opinions, whilst keeping abreast of all the latest news about your area of interest. If there is a special convention coming up, or a really important dataset is due to be released online, you should be among the first to know about it by keeping in touch with your fellow enthusiasts.

‘Being part of an online community gives you access to a goldmine of knowledge.’

These communities come in various guises. Joining a mailing list is one way to be part of an online community. Mailing lists allow subscribed members to debate a chosen topic and exchange information; each time somebody writes a comment an email is sent out to alert the other members of the list so that they can read it and reply. One of the most popular genealogy mailing lists is at www.rootschat.com, but a large selection of lists covering an extensive range of genealogical subjects can be found listed at Rootsweb – www.rootsweb.ancestry.com – whilst GENUKI also has a wealth of mailing lists found by searching at www.genuki.org.uk/searches.

SUMMARY

Online sources of information include:

• Dataset websites, such as those of national and local archives, newspapers and commercial organizations, providing digital collections of records

• Portal websites, for advice, information and links to other websites and collections

• Forums, communities and mailing lists, for subscribers to share information and research

If you would rather avoid the constant emails generated by mailing lists, but still like the idea of joining an online community, take a look at the Nations Memory Bank (NMB) website where you can become a member of one of the Family, Military, House, Fashion, and Local, National Trust or Food communities at www.nationsmemorybank. co.uk. NMB is a digital archive of all of our memories, not just family history, where photos can be uploaded and memories of different events relating to the images are placed on a memory map and discussed by other users in the forums. For example, you can post a picture of your family and ask other users of the site to help you name the people in it, or provide stories about what they were like. This is a great website for learning from other people’s experiences, and you can search for key words to find memories about a topic or place of interest relevant to your research. NMB is also a brilliant space for storing your own research. If you have recorded an interview with an elderly relative, why not transcribe that interview and store it as a memory on the site so that other users can read and learn from their recollections? (However, remember to seek the permission of the interviewee before putting their life story in the public domain.)

Internet Etiquette and Problems Associated with Online Genealogy

Experienced genealogists have voiced their concerns over the past few years about the increasing reliance on Internet resources as opposed to traditional methods of research. Whilst this largely stemmed at first from a reluctance to adapt to new technology, they have raised some very valid points.

Millions of original documents, catalogues and indexes have been digitized so that they can be searched online quickly and from the comfort of your own home, but this has led to a misapprehension that it is now possible to research an entire family tree on the Internet. This is certainly not the case, and although most of the key ‘first step’ resources are now online, only a very small percentage of the entire range of original documents useful to genealogists is available from the Internet. You will be required to make many trips to various archives, but this is all part of the fun.

Before you can even begin taking advantage of the many records that are online, you will probably need to research your family tree offline for at least a few generations before the Internet records are of any real use. The majority of records online pertain to the nineteenth century, mainly because many more recent sources (such as the vast majority of twentieth-century censuses) are ‘closed’ – that is, they are not available to be made public – because they contain sensitive personal information about individuals who could be still alive. More datasets for the twentieth century are now becoming available, however, such as phonebooks and directories, though these alone will not be enough to trace back a branch – only place them in one location at a given time. Online records for earlier eras are also scant, mainly because there are no centralized indexes for resources like parish registers and wills proved in county courts, making the task of putting them all online a very large-scale and time-consuming one.

‘The majority of records online pertain to the nineteenth century.’

Common Problems Working Online

Aside from the documents you may not be able to locate on the Internet, the ones that are available online come with their own set of problems. For a start, do not expect to locate online sources for your ancestors by simply typing their name into a major search engine like Google, Ask Jeeves, or Yahoo! While this will sometimes yield results if you are very lucky or if an ancestor was particularly famous, most will need to be found using a site-specific search engine, which requires that you first locate the relevant website. This is best done by starting with a source such as GENUKI or Cyndi’s List, described earlier.

Specialist search engines allow you to search the website’s online indexes either by keyword, surname, date or place. They will often have been created by people who have manually transcribed words from the original documents into computer software. While this is part of the beauty of Internet research, allowing you to find what you are looking for instantly without the need to consult card indexes or scroll through every page of a document to find a particular name, databases create problems of their own. There are many errors in the transcriptions that can make locating the entry you want difficult. These errors are usually because the person doing the transcribing was not able to read the original old handwriting very well. For example, if you were looking for Adam Benny on the census, his name may have been wrongly transcribed into the computer’s index as something similar, such as ‘Alan Remy’, in which case it would be difficult to locate this entry using a name search. There are tips on how to overcome some of these common errors throughout the book under the relevant subject headings, but if you find it very difficult locating records that should be online, then you will have to consult the original indexes or records at the archives.

Reliability: Checking Sources Online

As has been mentioned many times before, if you do find other researchers willing to share their findings with you online, whether through a family tree sharing site or a forum, make sure to always ask them how and where they found their sources so that you can double-check them yourself and ascertain their accuracy. There are thousands of people working in the online community who will hopefully be able to help you when you are stuck, but there is always the possibility that they have made errors too. This advice goes for websites set up by enthusiasts as well – plenty of people have now mastered the art of compiling their family history onto a personalized website, but there are no official checks to ensure all information published online is accurate, so it is important to carry out your own checks on their data. You can usually establish whether or not a website belongs to an accredited organization or a private individual from the URL address (i.e. the www. website address). If the address ends in ‘gov.uk’ this means it has been set up by a government organization, and those ending in ‘ac.uk’ belong to academic institutes, therefore their content should be reliable. Look out for the website administrator’s contact details so that you can get in touch with them should you need to qualify the validity of their data.

‘If you publish your family tree on a website or online, be aware of the various copyright laws that protect information supplied to you by other researchers or publications.’

Citations and Copyright

When incorporating online sources into your research it is vital that you cite those sources with the same attention to detail as you would for original documents from the archives. Include the full web address and details about the dataset or the owner of the site’s material. If you are considering publishing your family tree on a website or online using a family tree sharing facility, you must be cautious of the various copyright laws that protect information supplied to you by other researchers or publications. Any information you have found from databases online or on CD-ROM, or that has been supplied to you by other researchers’ websites, forum or mailing list postings, is protected by copyright, and therefore you should not replicate this data without first obtaining the owner’s permission.

SUMMARY

Problems associated with online genealogy:

• Not all documents are available online; you’ll still have to visit archives

• Transcription errors in online indexes will make your search more difficult at times

• The Internet has no quality controls on entries; double-check all your sources

• Copyright law will still apply to all online sources you quote

The laws on Crown Copyright have recently been modified so that you can transcribe extracts from unpublished original documents found in archives as long as the full reference is quoted. The laws pertaining to copyright are complex and official advice can be found at www.ipo.gov.uk. You should also be very wary of posting information in your family tree about anybody who is still alive without first asking their permission. The laws on data protection are unlikely to be a problem to you, but you have a duty to protect the privacy of those who have been kind enough to help you with your research, and those relatives who may be unaware of your investigations into their past. Most family tree sharing sites automatically hide details about living relatives from other users until you have given your permission for specific users to view your tree, and Cyndi’s List has links on its GEDCOM page under ‘Privacy in GEDCOM files’ to programs that will remove living relatives from a GEDCOM file before uploading it to an online database.

Getting Help Offline

Problem Solving

Section Four provides a unique resource for all family historians – a structured route through some of the more popular but often technically difficult topics that you are likely to encounter during your investigations into your past. However, if the suggestions included in the Section Four guides can’t answer your questions, here are a few more tips and tricks to help get you back on track again – bearing in mind, of course, that there may not actually be a solution!

Each type of document will present its own unique set of obstacles that may hinder you from finding the person you are looking for. A birth in England or Wales in 1846 may not be found in the civil registration indexes, for example, because although civil registration began in 1837, the rules governing its enforcement were not tightened up until 1875, and many people simply didn’t bother. These specific problems will be addressed when each subject is explored in detail in Sections Two and Three, but there are more general issues that affect most types of records.

Changes in the way names and places have been spelt over time are a common hindrance to family historians. When registering the name of a birth or baptism, or even when filling out a census return, the priest, registrar or enumerator would write a name how they heard it said, and very often the informant was illiterate and so would not be able to correct them if it was spelt wrong. Therefore, if you cannot find an ancestor in alphabetical indexes under the name you were expecting, think of all the variations of spelling that name could sound like and conduct a search under those options too. Common variations occur when there is a silent letter, such as ‘e’ at the end of a name.

‘If you cannot find an ancestor in alphabetical indexes under the name you were expecting, think of all the variations of spelling that name could sound like and conduct a search under those options too.’

Similar rules apply to the spelling of place names that have been known to change frequently over time, but you should also be wary of places around the country (and even the world) being called the same name. There are indexes, like F. Smith’s A Genealogical Gazetteer of England, that can help you to find in which counties a place name is found, and thus help you continue your research in the correct area.

There are plenty of useful reference books to help you with a particular line of historical research. Your local library will stock a range of publications on the subject, particularly specialist volumes that include indexes. There are also many genealogical journals and magazines released weekly and monthly, like Ancestors Magazine, The Genealogists Magazine, Family History Monthly and Family Tree Magazine and, of course, the Who Do You Think You Are? magazine. They are all packed with fascinating articles and top tips, discussing the latest finding aids, computer software and issues that affect the modern genealogist. A lot of these magazines also have a genealogy agony aunt who will answer readers’ research questions.

Family History Societies

If, at any point during your research, you feel daunted by the next step, or have hit a brick wall on a certain line of enquiry, there are a multitude of individuals and societies out there that can be of assistance. Whatever your problem, it is likely that others have ground to a halt for similar reasons before you but have eventually found a route forward. Very few research problems are unique in genealogy, and as you find your way around one obstacle you will be able to use that experience as a lesson for the next time you get stuck. Even if you are confident researching your family tree alone, it is still advisable to join one of the many family and local history societies that we are lucky enough to have access to in the UK. You will always learn something from the experience other members have to offer, and be able to utilize the indexes, transcriptions and local projects that they have worked upon and which may not be available anywhere else.