Genealogy Chat

Will post below as it is a bit long.

Getting started. A few tips and apologies to the more experienced. thought it might help those new to this. GC is a wonderful site for you to start with but don’t think you can join and trace your family tree in 15 minutes. People on here will help enormously and are very generous but don’t expect them to do all your research for you. You will come across ‘brickwalls’ and this may take months or even years to break down but believe you me the satisfaction of doing so is more joyous than finding another branch too easily. If you can get back to 1600 then you are doing well. Researching your family history and getting it right involves hours of research tracking down old records via Archive Offices and LDS centres. You cannot trace your family tree via the IGI or any other Family Tree Projects. Many of these trees are the result of wishful thinking with added fiction. Not sure what I mean then take a look at the 2 web sites I give here. (http://freepages(.)genealogy(.)rootsweb(.)com/~jofran6/) (http://www(.)geocities(.)com/steelsfirm/gen(.)html) Remove the brackets. OK what to do 1) Buy a decent atlas of Britain ….. so you can familiarise yourself with the area you are researching 2) Buy a good genealogy book. I use ‘The Family and Local History Handbook’. But any ‘good’ genealogy book will do. Oh and read it. 3) Join a mailing list. Roots Web have all the lists you will need and they are free to subscribe to. However don’t go blundering in and ask for what you want straight away. Familiarise yourself for about a week with the mails that come through. A tip here, when you eventually say what you are researching put it in the heading otherwise a lot of the members will delete it. Also be as detailed as possible. People will help but only if they think you have put some work in first. 4) Consider joining the local FHS of the area you are researching. You will find most of them very helpful and the cost of £8 to £10 pa is cheap when you consider what you will receive. 5) Finally, for those wanting to search further on the internet then take a look at GENUKI a site for research in Britain. This site will keep you busy for hours. John

Thanks John keep the tips coming One I wish I had done sooner is TALK to the living rellies I havent many oldies left now being a young 59 but I wish I had listened to my gran. however its surprising the info you can get from conversations. to illustrate a cousin came up with a newspaper clip of grandfathers death by being knocked down by a motorcycle never knew that it also had a number of other leads so TALK TALK TALK Sandra