Tonight will be the 8th in my 10 week course on tracing your ancestry, which has been running at Stratford on Avon College in Warwickshire since the beginning of October. So far, it seems to have gone very well, and I will be running another one from 8th January, as long as we have enough enrolments.
If you know of anyone who lives in the Stratford area and would be interested in learning how to trace ancestry from scratch – here’s a run down of what I cover in the course:
- How to use the internet to carry out searches. The advantages and disadvantages of searching on the internet. What you can and can’t find on the internet.
- Civil Registration – how to search for and order birth, marriage and death certificates, and what they can tell you.
- How to chart your family history, and how to organize your records.
- Census records – the history of the census – how to search it, and what information you will find on it.
- Parish registers – how to search the registers, where to search them and what information you can find.
- How to use County Record Offices and archives
- Wills – how to search for them and what information they can give you.
- Old Handwriting and Latin – a few tips and exercises on reading old hand and some basic Latin for family historians.
- Information on other resources – e.g. newspapers, land records, criminal records, military records etc
Half way through the course I arrange a guided tour of Warwickshire Record Office (there is a small fee for this) – which includes a talk by one of the archivists, a tour of the record office including the strong rooms, and a selection of documents for the students to look at.
We hold the class in the computer rooms and we have internet access every evening, so students actually get to carry out research during the course, and have me to help them.
It’s been great fun – and I’m very much looking forward to running the next one.
For more details, here’s the link: Family History – Find Out the Mystery of Your Past
Elyse,I too became very iseertnted in my own genealogy at the age of 13. this was done because I never knew my grandparents on my paternal side and mine on my maternal side were gone by the age of 8, so the memories are scattered. I made my own charts when I didn’t even know that there were pedigree charts out there. What is amazing is that although I never knew them I have dragged my mother to see or talk to every possible relative or far fetched connection or neighbor or school chum that has ever existed to make up for that. I have squeezed every nugget in any corner I can. If one of my parents or my siblings pointed to someone at a ballgame, I would walk over and ask questions, and still do today. What matters is your enthusiasm for the craft and your gifts to yourself and others..-= Kimb4s last blog .. =-.