Collins Tracing Your Family History. Anthony Adolph

has 8 million members worldwide and over 111 million names. It is therefore becoming a formidable research tool, which can already be used to localise where people with particular surnames were born and communicate with people actively researching them. The site is one of several that provides access to many important sets of data, particularly the quarterly indexes to General Registration indexes and 1841–1901 census returns.

      OTHER GENERAL WEBSITES

      The internet, as everyone knows, contains a great many websites of use to genealogists. There is no official central portal for these, but there is an unofficial one, www.cyndislist.com, which has assumed this role and contains categorised links to pretty much everything that’s out there.

      A British version of this is www.genuki.org.uk, containing links to many useful websites for the whole British Isles. Genuki also hosts a plethora of newsgroups and mailing lists, searchable under areas and topics, that you can join. An overview of other important websites is given here.

      SOCIETIES

      Many countries have societies formed by genealogists to help each other. The main one in Britain is the Society of Genealogists (SoG). Its library is the finest of its kind, including the Great Card Index (3.5 million slips from a vast array of sources) and a huge collection of pedigrees submitted by members, varying enormously in quality but including many of very high standard. The contents of its library together with many searchable databases are on its website. It publishes the Genealogists’ Magazine.

      A curiosity in English genealogy is the Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies (IHGS). It organises a graded series of courses and qualifications in genealogy. It also has a library that is open to the public for a fee and produces a journal, Family History.

      Most counties (sometimes even parts of counties) and some specialist areas such as Catholic and Anglo-German have family history societies. They come under the umbrella of the Federation of Family History Societies (FFHS). Membership includes many Commonwealth and United States societies too, and it publishes Family History News and Digest biannually, summarising the contents of the different journals. Family History Societies have membership worldwide and their journals include articles on relevant sources and case studies, lists of members’ interests and ancestral names. Many also have their own libraries and organise projects to index records such as gravestones and censuses. It is often a good idea to join your nearest Family History Society even if you do not have any local ancestors, because many of the talks will be of more general application, and many organise reciprocal research via other societies.

ONE-NAME SOCIETIES

      THESE SOCIETIES concern those interested in specific names, such as the Fairfax Society. Many are members of the FFHS and Guild of One-Name Studies (‘GOONS’!). Many produce journals or newsletters, and besides collecting and tracing individual family trees for a name, many systematically extract all references to the name from categories of records such as General Registration indexes, so are well worth consulting.

      Large libraries, such as the SoG, have collections of journals from societies outside Britain. The FFHS and www.cyndislist.com can put you in touch with relevant societies abroad.

      QUICK REFERENCE

      SOCIETY OF GENEALOGISTS (SoG)

      www.sog.org.uk

      INSTITUTE OF HERALDIC AND GENEALOGICAL STUDIES (IHGS)

      www.ihgs.ac.uk

      FEDERATION OF FAMILY HISTORY SOCIETIES (FFHS)

      www.ffhs.org.uk

      GUILD OF ONE-NAME STUDIES (GOONS)

      www.one-name.org

      MAGAZINES

      There are a number of family history magazines on the market, publishing ‘how to’ articles, items on general and specialist sources and specific family stories, and usually including book, software and website reviews, question-and-answer pages, letters, news and contact details for both professional and private researchers. The main ones in Britain are Family History Monthly, Family Tree Magazine, Practical Family History, Who Do You Think You Are?, Your Family Tree and Ancestors, the latter produced by TNA. In a similar category is the Genealogical Services Directory, which provides up-to-date contact details for all British Isles record offices, family history societies, organisations and professional record searchers and genealogists.

      BIBLIOGRAPHIES

      Much research has already been published and it is always worth checking to see if your family tree is included. The main British genealogical bibliography is G. W. Marshall’s The Genealogist’s Guide (GPC, reprinted 1973); supplemented by J. B. Whitmore’s A Genealogical Guide: An Index to British Pedigrees in Continuation of Marshall’s Genealogist’s Guide (J. B. Whitmore, 1953). Besides the well-known Burke’s publications, heralds’ visitations (see here) and much else, these books encompass the rich veins of material ranging from transcripts of pedigrees in Close Rolls to copies of memorial inscriptions in overseas cemeteries, published in Victorian and early 20th-century antiquarian journals.

      Coming closer to the present, there is G. B. Barrow’s The Genealogists’ Guide: An Index to Printed British Pedigrees and Family Histories 1950–75 (Research Publishing Co., 1977), followed by T. R. Thompson’s A Catalogue of British Family Histories (Research Publishing Co and SoG, 1980). Incredibly useful too are Stuart Raymond’s County Bibliographies (S. A. and M. J. Raymond). These books reference published material (including family history journals) in terms of family histories and local histories, newspapers, county histories and published records of all sorts, particularly providing an overview of the publications of the county and national record societies and publications.

      For Scotland there are M. Stuart’s Scottish Family History (GPC, 1978), supplemented by P. S. Ferguson’s Scottish Family Histories (National Library of Scotland, 1986), and for Ireland, the bibliographies compiled by B. de Breffny in 1964 and E. MacLysaght in 1982.

      Many privately published and rare manuscript family histories are catalogued in the SoG’s online catalogue, SoGCAT, www.sog.org.uk/sogcat/sogcat. Many printed family histories are digitally available in the Family History Library catalogue section of www.familysearch.org.

      BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARIES

      Many countries have biographical dictionaries. Britain has led the way with L. Stephen and S. Lee’s Dictionary of National Biography (Smith, Elder&Co., 1885), which was kept up to date by a series of supplements and completely revised and re-edited to create the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (OUP, 2004). It is available in print and can be searched online on a subscription basis at www.oup.com/oxforddnb, though it should also be available at good libraries. You can search not just under the names of the subjects, but also under any other names (such as wives, sons-in-law, and so on) appearing in the articles and also by topic. So if you want to find any biographies mentioning something like ice cream, you can.

      The DNB has been fully updated by a huge team of writers, including me, and the biographies include, where known, dates and places of birth, death, marriage and burial and