Help! Where do I look now?

Where do you go when you need help with your family tree?  Maybe there’s a designated genealogist among your relatives, or in the tradition of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, you phone a friend.  Or you might write to a family history magazine with your query and hope it gets published.  But as those avenues don’t always provide the solution you’re seeking, or in your timeframe, what should you try next? 

The ideal is to ask an expert, or someone with at least some more experience in the field you’re researching.  Perhaps surprisingly, you can find people like that who are willing to help without charging you.  This post will explore some of the options that you can try.

First of all, however, it’s worth looking at how to describe your problem to others who know nothing of your family.  Great-uncle Jimmy’s merchant navy career may be legendary among your immediate relatives, but your potential helpers are meeting him for the first time, so be precise in what you ask, and give enough information that will allow them to identify a possible source.  Rather than say “Looking for navy records for Jimmy Black who died in 1951”, try “Looking for merchant seaman’s records of any kind for James Alfred Black, born 1918, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, died 1951, Liverpool”. 

Many of the online help sources you can use are organised like notice boards, so use a brief subject line such as “Merchant Navy records” to highlight the likely source of information you’re looking for.

And now, where are these sources you can turn to with your queries?

Most archives and record offices will have general help sections on their websites.  These will have information about the records they hold and the kind of details these may provide about your ancestors.  If your question is simply a matter of understanding what records they have, or the nature of their contents, this is a good place to start.

If your query is more detailed, try one of these:

#AncestryHour  Every Tuesday at 7pm UK standard time, Twitter hosts an hour of discussion, questions and answers purely about family history.  Anyone can join in and ask a question, and you may even get an answer during the hour from another genealogist!  If not, you’re likely to get some solid suggestions of where to turn for advice.  Use the hashtag #AncestryHour to see the posts and comments.

WalkMyPast  Imagine you’ve discovered a long-lost branch of your family, and now you know why they’ve been lost for so long – they emigrated to the other side of the world!  You would love to visit the quayside where they arrived, see the house they built, or the farm they worked, but it’s just not feasible.  Fear not, help is at hand in the form of “genies” – volunteer genealogists who live in or near your family’s new home overseas.  With WalkMyPast, you can identify a genie who is willing to transcribe headstones, take photos, or look up records on your behalf.  Search the site by place to find out who you might contact to ask for assistance.  Genies are located around the world including places in Europe, North America, the British Isles, and the Antipodes.

Who Do You Think You Are? magazine offers both traditional and digital forms of help with your brick walls.  Its online forum is divided into different areas of focus where you can share problems and queries in fields such as military history and photo identification.  You can also swap your unwanted certificates with others who have similar interests, and join in discussions about various genealogical topics, or the latest episode of the magazine’s associated TV programme.

A perhaps lesser-known part of FamilySearch.org’s offering is its research groups.  These cover countries ranging from Albania to Zimbabwe, and specialised topics like genetic genealogy and Jewish research.  Joining one or more of these groups can connect you with like-minded family historians and give you opportunities to ask your questions.

Each of the above online resources is free to register with and use, and they allow you to not only receive help but to give it in return.  Being part of a virtual genealogy community can open up avenues of research and inspire you to try different methods to solve those family history mysteries that have baffled you for too long!

Free family history books

Imagine an immense library that’s accessible from the comfort of your home (or anywhere you like), at no cost, whose books you can search using names, places, occupations, and any keyword you like, to help you with your family research.  Well, here it is, in just three excellent online sources of full-text books, which include many genealogy, biography and general history titles.   

FamilySearch Digital Library is a collaboration between the family history provider and a number of public and academic libraries in North America, but with a worldwide reach – for instance, search for “Clan Macrae” and the first result is the “History of the Clan Macrae, with genealogies”.  Note the Access Level information – in this case, it is “Public”; if it says “Protected” the book is not available to view online, usually due to copyright restrictions. 

To read the text, click on “Full Text Results” and you’re shown a list of copies of this book – in some cases, these are sections or chapters only.  Once you’ve identified the version you want to read, you’ll be able to flick through the digital pages, or search the text.  If I look for the word “Lochalsh” in the Macrae history there are 77 matches, and I can click on each match to read the page in question. This makes finding information relevant to your research much easier.

Internet Archive handily gives you a visual preview of the digital book you’re looking for: here, my search for “Clan Macrae” shows the title page of the same volume as was featured on FamilySearch.  Clicking on this shows me a delightful photograph of the author which appears at the beginning of the book.  Again, I can leaf through the book, zoom in to enlarge text, and search the contents by keyword.  

Some books on Internet Archive appear in plain text format – that is, not a digital copy but a machine-generated transcript of the book’s contents.  This leads to some interesting typos but it is still searchable (you'll sometimes see its contents included in general search engine results).  When viewing a page like this - or any internet page - press the Ctrl and F keys simultaneously.  In the empty box that will appear at the top of your screen, type the words you’re searching the text for, then use the arrows to navigate to each occurrence of your keyword. 

Google Books bills itself as “the world’s most comprehensive index of full-text books”.  The important word to note is “index”; not every book here is available in its entirety, some being only partial previews of a few pages or chapters, and some purely a listing of the book’s title. 

While many full texts are included in Google Books, “History of the Clan Macrae” is not one of them.  When I search for it, I can see several editions are listed, but none of them in full – these are either marked “No preview”, “Limited preview”, or “Snippet view”.  The Snippet view can be searched and it returns 72 matches for “Lochalsh”, which is only slightly less than I was able to view via the FamilySearch Library.  Unfortunately, Google will only let me see the pages for three of these matches, so it’s significantly less useful in this case.  "Limited preview", contrary to what its name suggests, often provides quite extensive access to books.  Get an idea of what you can see by viewing "Tracing Your British and Irish Ancestors", which is a limited preview text.  And, as you can see, it's easy to share links to these books.

Not every out-of-copyright book will be available in full via Google Books, but one example is “The Scottish Gaël”.  A useful feature on Google Books is the “Add to my library” button which lets you save your finds for future reference.  This will work best if you are signed in to your Google account while searching.  

Just as an additional hint, Amazon often have a useful book preview called “Look Inside” which can run to a few chapters and may allow you to find the information you need without buying the book.  This is especially handy when searching for more up-to-date titles.  And no postage necessary!

Wishing you happy reading...

Doors Open!

Mile End Mill, home to Paisley Heritage Centre

Have you heard of Doors Open Days?  Around the UK, they are held annually, and include many buildings that are not normally open to the public, or which charge entry fees, allow free admission and have special events to mark the day.

This being Renfrewshire’s Doors Open Days weekend, my friend Anne and I visited some of the venues, including Paisley Heritage Centre.  This is housed in a former thread mill, and we were lucky enough to see some of the wonderfully detailed poor law records relating to Paisley residents who fell on hard times in the Victorian era.  Some of these are indexed online, so I had been able to check for ancestors in advance of our visit, which allowed me to identify one individual whose record we viewed - even though the writing posed a bit of a challenge!

1787 Map of Paisley

We were also shown good-sized reproductions of 19th- and early 20th-century maps of Anne’s neighbourhood, and thanks to her local history knowledge she was able to pinpoint familiar landmarks as well as areas which have completely changed since then.  I found some maps of 18^th-century Paisley which illustrated the homes of individual families, including some of my ancestors.

It's worth noting that this particular Heritage Centre’s resources are available Monday-Saturday, and not just on special occasions like today.  Community services like these are priceless, and indispensable to family history research.

Parish Church of
Houston & Killellan

We later travelled to the nearby country village of Houston to visit the parish church, and received a lovely warm welcome.  We admired the gorgeous stained glass windows and handcrafted embroidery inside, then basked in the peace and tranquillity of the church’s rose garden of remembrance.  It was extremely tempting to sit there all day, beneath the trees, listening to the birdsong.

Check out your area’s Doors Open Day and take advantage of this once-a-year opportunity to see inside buildings that have special relevance to your family, their work and lives.  Some areas, like the city of Glasgow, have expanded from one day to a festival lasting an entire week, with lots of tours, talks, and exhibitions as well as access to glorious architecture – and that’s coming up in a couple of weeks' time, so plan your visit soon.

£2 for the biggest family history show in the country (not RootsTech)

Take more than a handful of family history societies, add plenty of groups promoting their military, historical and heritage interests, mix in free advice from genealogy enthusiasts, and top it off with a smattering of expert speakers - et voilà! you have the biggest annual family history event in Scotland, the Lanarkshire Family History Society show, taking place in Motherwell Civic Centre on Saturday 5th October.  

At just £2 for entry, it's an absolute bargain.  It's £3 extra if you want to attend one of the talks, or £10 for all of them.  

My top frugal tip for this event is to leave your plastic and hard-earned savings at home - the specialist family history supplies, books, maps, and yes, gifts, are very hard to resist splurging on.  On the other hand, if your hard-earned savings have been reserved for exactly this kind of spending, go for it.  It's not often some of these companies make a Scottish appearance.  

Check out the website for a full list of the societies, organisations and vendors who will be there, the speakers and their topics, and directions to the venue.

And I'll probably see you there!