Researching Your Family History Online For Dummies by Nick Barratt

Author:Nick Barratt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2011-02-06T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Digging Deeper into Your Family’s Past

In This Chapter

Introducing specialised online resources

Appreciating the value of wills

Meeting military and naval records

Investigating immigration, criminal and other significant records

Getting genetic

You’ll find that the longer you spend researching your family history, the more interest the other members of your family take in your investigations, the more paperwork you have to find a home for and the more intrigued you become about every new piece of information you find. Genealogy is a rewarding business, but you’ll likely hit a time when you begin to wonder how much more you can actually discover. You start to worry that you’ll reach dead-ends or find your ancestors disappearing irretrievably into the mists of time. But your research project isn’t over.

Genealogy isn’t just about finding names and dates and using them to draw comprehensive family trees. After you’ve exhausted the possibilities of civil records, parish records and the census (all of which we talk about in Chapter 5), your research project hasn’t so much reached a full stop as a new beginning. You now have a skeleton, but you need to put meat on the bones. Now is the time to consider who your ancestors were: what were their lives like? What did they do for a living? What times did they live through? What events did they witness? Your research becomes a brand-new adventure – and this chapter helps you through it.

You may have learned from the census or a birth, marriage or death certificate that your great-great-uncle was a soldier in the Royal Fusiliers, that your great-great-great-grandfather was born in Germany or that your paternal great-great-great-great-grandparents lived in a mansion in Mayfair with a butler and fifteen servants. This sort of info gives your ancestors a bit of character, but you can still find out more. Census and civil registration documents act as a springboard for further research and can be full of untapped potential.

Not all the resources you need for the next stage of your research are available online, however. Collections of records and indexes to them are being added all the time, but try to be realistic when you embark upon this stage of your research. In this chapter, we look at a number of resources that are online, and in Chapter 7 we discuss offline resources and how to find them. We suggest you use the two chapters in conjunction.

Weighing Up Wills

Wills are a particularly valuable source of information for genealogists. Not only does a will confirm when your ancestor died and where he or she was living at the time of death, but it also lists the beneficiaries, including perhaps the names, professions and domestic and marital situations of spouses, children, grandchildren, more distant relatives and friends. Wills therefore are a means of binding together families and generations, which is particularly useful if all the names and dates that you possess have come from parish records (for more about the difficulties of deciding who’s who on the basis of parish records, see Chapter 5).

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