| Genealogy Contacts & Hints |
Where do we start. At the beginning I suppose which is as good a place as any. Who am i is the first question to ask, where did i come from is the second. Start with your name in full as you will be looking for surnames to start with. Write your name on a piece of paper. Follow this with your date of birth. Now. What is your fathers name and date of birth. What is your mothers name and date of birth. Write them down. After each name write the town and country they were born in. Next. Who are your dads parents. Write them down. Who are your mums parents. Write them down. Dont forget all the birth dates, marriage dates and death dates for each person. You now have the start of your chart. Start adding your brothers & sisters. After you get their dates etc, write them on your chart. Now ask about any brothers and sisters you dad & mum have. Get their names, places born, birth dates, marriage & death dates. When you have collected all this information it will be time to look for somewhere to put it and make it into some layout you can understand. Genaelogy programmes will come in various ways, there are the ones you can buy in the computer shop, these are of some use but beware of the ones where you can only use the manufacturers bits of the programme and not export your data. My recommendation is to use a shareware programme from the internet, it is called "Brothers Keeper" you can try before you buy and is free to download from the web. It also works with the international system for geneaelogy storage. This is called GEDCOM and allows you to export and import to the system worlwide. You can get many reports and insert photos and keep notes that you dont want to publish. Also any CDs that come with commercial programmes will be of limited use as you wont find all your family on a couple of discs. Most of the information you will need will come from records stored in archives which allow you to search, sometimes for a small fee. Now you have sorted out your storage programme and have some information on it, dont forget to save it to disc/cd/ memory stick. I keep two copies just in case one gets damaged. I dont want to put 350 people back in from scratch. Now you can go back to searching for more people. Look for all the family members of your Uncles and Aunts. These will be your dads & mums brothers & sisters. It gets more difficult to find people the further you have to go back in time. Your Granparents Mum & Dad (Great grandparents) will be better to find if your grandparents are still alive. When you enter all them into your chart you will have found your way into genaelogy. All the information you need is out there, you just have to find it. I will make a list of some references to aid you but there are so many I would need a very large book for them all. If you get stuck, the internet is a great place to look. Family History sites are great and the people who run them are very helpful. I find genaelogy a bit like smoking very habit forming and difficult to stop only healthier. Happy Hunting. |
| Contact Sites |
Scotland www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk www.scotsorigins.com Census records from 1871-1901 Full registration from 1855 Ireland www.groireland.ie (Protestant) www.groni.gov.uk (Northern Ireland) 83.220.200.136/ipac20/ipac.jsp?profile=death www.cmcrp.net Protestant Registration began 1845 Full registration began 1864 Overseas registration www.worldgenweb.org/countryindex.html England www.familyrecords.gov.uk/topics/census.html General sites www.genuki.org.uk cyndislist.com/beginner.htm cyndislist.com/handy.htm www.rootsweb.com Church of the latter day saints (LDS.) Thse are only a few of the many sites on the web but I have put a few not well known ones to give some help. Dont forget to check old church records called OPRs (Old Parochial Records) Wills and property records, census collections, shipping records for people coming to a country and going away (immigration lists). When looking for your name on a search panel dont forget to try different spellings of the name. My main tip is : Make sure you are following the right family and if possible get a B/M/D certificate to confirm what you find. You can go on the wrong trail very easily and it can be a lot of wasted time. GOOD LUCK. |
