How-to Guides
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The Curious Domestic Arrangements of John Hardwicke (1760-1826) – Part Two
Read more: The Curious Domestic Arrangements of John Hardwicke (1760-1826) – Part TwoAn Adventure at The National Archives This week I made my first visit to The National Archives at Kew. My mission was straightforward enough. I wanted to find out when my ancestor John Hardwicke joined the Excise, where he was posted, and when he eventually left the role. Like most family historians, I began the…
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Beyond the Hint Leaves: Choosing Family History Resources as a Beginner
Read more: Beyond the Hint Leaves: Choosing Family History Resources as a BeginnerOne of the questions I am asked most frequently by people beginning their family history journey is deceptively straightforward: which family history subscription should I choose? It is usually asked shortly after somebody has discovered an interesting ancestor, uncovered an unexpected family story, or found themselves becoming surprisingly invested in the life of a nineteenth-century…
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The Curious Chaos of Surname Spellings: How to Crack the Code Without Losing Your Mind
Read more: The Curious Chaos of Surname Spellings: How to Crack the Code Without Losing Your MindFamily history research often reveals ancestors who seem to vanish due to inconsistent surname spellings caused by poor handwriting, transcription errors, and regional accents. This post discusses how these variations create artificial obstacles and offers strategies for overcoming them, emphasising the importance of context and broader search methods in genealogy.
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Irish Genealogy: A Study in Absence
Read more: Irish Genealogy: A Study in AbsenceI shall preface this article with a disclaimer: I am an experienced, but still amateur, family historian. There are multiple layers of complexity surrounding Irish history, and I am by no means an expert. This article hopes to cast some light on why researching Irish ancestors might be a challenge. To explore Irish ancestry is…
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A Most Perplexing Silence: Navigating Dead Ends in Family History
Read more: A Most Perplexing Silence: Navigating Dead Ends in Family HistoryThere are few things in family history quite as humbling as making a cup of tea in celebration of an apparent breakthrough, only to spend the next three hours discovering that your ancestor has vanished entirely from the historical record. One moment you are progressing quite happily, collecting census returns, parish register entries and occasional…
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Whispers from the Past: Turning Ancestral Discoveries into Delightful Tales
Read more: Whispers from the Past: Turning Ancestral Discoveries into Delightful TalesThere comes a point in most family history journeys when the excitement of finding records collides rather abruptly with the reality of writing about them. For months, or perhaps years, we happily collect census returns, parish registers, newspaper articles, wills, military records, and anything else that might reveal another fragment of an ancestor’s life. We…
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Where Rabbit Holes Lead to Ruin
Read more: Where Rabbit Holes Lead to RuinIf you’ve been researching your family history for any length of time, you’ll almost certainly have experienced it. You sit down with one perfectly sensible question, intending to spend half an hour finding an answer, and somehow emerge several hours later surrounded by parish registers, census returns and half-built family trees that have very little…
