By road, by sea or by Shanks’s Pony?
As many of you may know, last week was RootsTech London. It was an amazing few days, with so many inspiring lectures, exhibitors and genealogists. I sensed that a theme running throughout the conference was connecting people and that is certainly something I managed to do. I met a lot of fellow genealogists in person […]
Researching Criminal Ancestors
In recent years, the expansion in digitisation of historical records used by genealogists and family historians has led to the wider availability of material relating to crime, policing and punishment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Materials such as criminal registers, institutional prison records and photographs or ‘mugshots’ are often used by archives and museums […]
High Court Records – what will you discover?
It is an irony of ancestor-hunting that you are more likely to find information about an ancestor who committed a crime than one who was a respectable, law-abiding citizen. You may have different reasons for wanting to search criminal records – perhaps you discovered your ancestor in prison in a census return; you are tracing […]
Weather – What Has Shakespeare Got To Do With It?
The Bard shows how an awareness of weather conditions can help the family historian. My paper, Answers in the Wind (JGFH-1), set out an argument for weather events to play a greater part in family history research. In this blog, I would like to offer a less formal walk through how the genealogist can include […]