Product Description

A guide to discovering your family history. It describes how to start and where to go for basic information.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #290514 in Books
• Published on: 2003-01-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Customer Reviews

Simply the best beginner's guide for UK genealogy.
This book is hands down the best beginner's guide to genealogical research if you have ancestors from the United Kingdom.

The writing is clear and concise and the examples given are crystal clear representations of the topic under discussion. The illustrations are purposeful and not simply gratuitous eye-candy.

The organization of the book is superb. It begins with the most basic and general record types a new researcher would need to access such as information from home and relative sources, civil registration, national censuses & parish registers. Each subsequent chapter introduces more complex and specialized record types in descending order of overall importance to the average researcher.

It is as if Jean Cole and John Titford, two giants in U.K. genealogy world, are right with you holding your hand each step along your research path.

This is not a detailed reference work such as Mark Herber's "Ancestral Trails". But if you could purchase only a single beginner's guide to genealogical research in the United Kingdom, "Tracing Your Family Tree" is the one to get.

If you ever want to trace your family tree don't miss this!
A fantastic book for first time genealogists such as myself, I found it easy to read and used many of the handy hints it contains. Sadly, it doesn't have a great deal on internet searching, but if your looking for UK ancestors in particular, it is invaluable. I would definately recommend this book, it is a wonderful guide and helps the reader ascertain just what kind of information they are looking for and how do go about searching for those details and stories that make the hobby of genealogy so exciting. At the very least it taught me how to spell genealogy correctly and not to get stuck just on one particular ancestor who all your family want to know more about..e.g. Dick Turpin (if you belong to the Turpin family), Jean tells you that there is normally more than one 'extraordinary' individual in anyones family and they should also be looked at...since I have read and studied this guide I found out that I am related to a famous watch maker, a witch who was hung etc., and plenty of family wars abound. Start tracing your family tree now and get this book to get you started, you won't regret it, I promise!

Very good starting point that offers more
While I haven't read the other books for beginners in detail, those I have looked at in the shops (remember the 'real world'?) are often glossy and superficial.

This title is well written and covers a lot grond that will not be at all obvious to a beginner (it wasn't to me). Having spend a while now researching, I am very glad I have this book to point the direction.

Beyond that it is well provided with detailed experience that will help me over the coming months (years!) - for example it stresses the variation in spelling of surnames, explains why census dates are variable, disucsses Julian calendars and gives many explanations for the discrepancies that litter historical records and their transcriptions.

It also references out to many detailed works, and mentions the Internet though wisely allows that to be the topic of other works (e.g. Genealogists Internet).

I know I will be referring back to this for some time.