Here’s a link to a web page which provides a free guide – a list of questions which you can ask your relative when interviewing them.

Obviously not all of the questions will be relevant but it’s a good start to give you ideas.

For more information see:
AncestorSearch: Interviewing relatives

It discusses the various disciplines of genealogy, busts some myths about the Garibaldi family, and suggests ways to research the history and culture of your genealogy.

If that’s not enough for you, you can browse the rest of their website, which has loads of information and resources for genealogists. This one is well worth a look!

For more information see:
http://italiangenealogy.tardio.com/News/article/sid=3.html

First, how to decipher individual characters, because alphabets evolve constantly. Second, how to interpret the many abbreviations that scribes often used, partly to save space and also to speed up the writing process.

Deciphering ancient documents is a useful skill for a genealogist because knowledge about individual letter-forms, ligatures, punctuation, and abbreviations, enables the palaeographer to read the text as the scribe intended it to be read.

There are beginner’s courses, courses about using the Internet for genealogy, and many specialised courses covering subjects such as how to search for information depending on what your ancestor was – a civil servant, a bigamist, a bastard?

All the courses seem to be very reasonably priced and some are free. The courses are all held at Goswell Road, London, EC1M 7BA unless stated otherwise.

For more information see:
http://www.sog.org.uk/events/calendar.shtml

The beginner’s course goes back to 1837 and the intermediate course covers research before 1837.

At £25 for two days both courses are inexpensive and affordable. According to their website subjects covered may include:

Beginners

How to begin

Surnames

Civil Registration from 1837

Researching on the Internet

Using computers

Census 1841-1901

Intermediate

Brief re-cap on Beginners Course

Parish Registers

Parish Chest

Wills & Probate

Local Repositories

Looking at your problem areas

For more information see:
http://www.dorsetfhs.org.uk/courses.htm

The Society’s website also offers information about other genealogy courses. For example, The University of Birmingham offers a two year part-time certificate course in Family History.

For more information see:
http://www.bmsgh.org/educate/edu1.html

They also have several articles and other resources for genealogists including a free newsletter.

Click on the banner below to visit their website.

In the course of gathering information to create this website we have visited many other websites and followed their links. Many of them are out of date, some pages have moved and some are now occupied by cyber-squatters hoping to earn a few dollars when the confused visitor desperately tries to click elsewhere. Be careful out there.

What prompted this posting was a website where very little worked any more. Ah, the answer was at the foot of the page – it was last updated in 1996.

For useful research, it’s better to use sites which are regularly updated.

Other issues such as border changes and the lack of availability of records from Russia contribute to the difficulty of research. In some cases many family members were killed in the Holocaust. It’s hard to believe that any records exist.

However, this may not be the case. Dr Saul Issroff has written an excellent article to help you in your quest to search for your Jewish ancestors.
http://www.movinghere.org.uk/galleries/roots/jewish/jewish.htm

They have a good range of articles available too. Look out for the one about “evidence” and don’t fall into the trap, as someone did, of saying “I found it on the Internet so it must be true”. Oh dear.

This website is definitely worth a visit:
http://www.britishancestry.org/