‘Using the Internet for Family History Research’

Wendy Archer - 16 Nov 2005- speaking at the BerksFHS Computer Branch, Woodley

Wendy introduced her talk by showing a picture of Radcot Bridge, the oldest crossing of the Thames in the area. She then explained how this was connected to her one-name study of the Pulker family. These were known from the Iffley area and the earliest record was a will of 1497. However an Internet booklist she watched listed an index to the Hundred Rolls of 1279 covering Witney borough & Bampton Hundred. A contact on the Oxfordshire Discussion list bought the book and found that the Pulcre family lived in the area and made a profit from traffic crossing the bridge.

Internet data can be free or charged. Charging can either be direct or by purchase of credit vouchers which may last a few days or several months. A large amount of free data exists due to efforts of volunteers.

Major free sites mentioned were

LDS, including the IGI at www.familysearch.org
IGI batch numbers for better searching from the Hugh Wallis site (use Google to locate)
FreeBMD at www.freebmd.org.uk/ for the index of births, marriage & deaths 1837-1910 of England & Wales
FreeCEN at http://freecen.rootsweb.com/ aiming to put all census data 1841-1901 online
Commonwealth War Graves new site at www.cwgc.org
National Archives at www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ leading to DocumentsOnline for wills, medalcards naval records etc and also A2A Access to Archives
GenUKI at www.genuki.org.uk
www.gazettes-online.co.uk for London, Belfast & Edinburgh Gazettes
Old maps from www.old-maps.co.uk and also sites such as www.yourmapsonline.org.uk

Sites that charge for results (although searching is often free) include

www.ancestry.co.uk or www.ancestry.com for complete records. 1861 - 1901 UK census
www.1837online.com for GRO and Overseas indexes 1837-2003, 1861 census and WW1 deaths
www.familyrelatives.org Images of all registrations 1837-2003, much of it indexed
www.familyhistoryonline.net records compiled by Family History Societies (mainly England)
www.britishorigins.com The web site of the Society of Genealogists with access to their records

Contacts

Email lists are a good way to contact researchers with a common interest. Start with
http://archiver.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/search
www.genesreunited.co.uk is a feepaying site with facilities to identify similar names.

Books

Old books can be a valuable source of data and many sites allow you to leave searches http://ukbookworld.com can be used to contact many booksellers and if one of your keywords appears, will send an email. Similar facilities exist on ebay

Updates

www.changenotes.com monitors the web pages that interest you and notifies you by email when they change.
Eastman's online newsletter is a long running service, now at http://blog.eogn.com/

updated 1 Sep 2007