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Tracing Your Family History (Collins Need to Know?)

By: Anthony Adolph
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Collins
ISBN: 0007235453
ISBN-13: 9780007235452
Released: 02 Apr 2007
RRP: £9.99
Average Rating:

Customer Reviews

Collins Tracing Your Family History - By: Dr J. Martin, 02 Feb 2006
This is an updated edition of a book that was first published in 2004. It is well produced & lavishly illustrated, though some sections could have done with a bit of basic, old-fashioned editorial work & proof-reading. The author, an experienced professional genealogist, covers alll the standard sources: oral evidence; birth, marriage & death certificates; census returns; wills, & so on. But there are also useful sections on subjects not touched on by earlier books on family history, such as the implications of DNA technology for genealogists, & the tracing of ancestors who were not born in Great Britain. It is particularly helpful to have an up-to-date address list, which includes some of the most useful websites. In alll, a valuable addition to any family historian's library, whether they are a beginner or an old hand.
Excellent FH introduction - By: , 25 Jan 2006
'Tracing Your Family History' is an excellent guide & reference book that will be useful for any genealogist starting out on a serious family history quest. Not owning Mark Herber's similarly aimed book, 'Ancestral Trails', which at a whopping 840 pages is more than twice the size of Adolph's volume, I can't compare the two, but TYFH is certainly a book that's designed to be used & would make an excellent present for someone starting out in their research. It's the kind of book that's worth dipping in to, & returning to from time to time, as well as reading from cover to cover.

Its chapters are structured by category of record, which means that it is easy find everything you need about specific types or sets of records in one place. This is useful as, once your family history investigation gets under way, this is usuallly the way one organises the research process.

One danger facing any author in this field is that the internet references quickly become dated. TYFH has a large number of URLs that can be usefully followed up, in fact more than enough to keep an assiduous researcher fully occupied for many, many months. However, if you're the kind of researcher that has to nail down every reference or potential website record then you probably need Peter Christian's 'The Genealogist's Internet', now in its third edition, as well.

It's hard to imagine any single book containing everything that a present-day genealogist would ever want, the range of documentary materials transcribed & online records available is simply too great, but this is an exellent single-volume description of the field that covers the full scope that almost alll family history projects will ever need.