|
Ancestral Trails. The Complete Guide to British Genealogy and Family HistoryAncestral Trails. The Complete Guide to British Genealogy and Family History. Second Edition. Mark D. Herber with a Foreword by John Titford. 2006, paper, Index, 896 pp.
Ancestral Trails guides the researcher through the substantial British archives, giving a detailed view of the records and the published sources available, analyzing each record and guiding the searcher to finding-aids and indexes. The early chapters help beginners take their first steps by dealing with such matters as obtaining information from living relatives, drawing family trees, and starting research in the records of birth, marriage, and death, or in census records. Later chapters guide researchers to the records that are more difficult to find and use, such as wills, parish registers, civil and ecclesiastical court records, poll books, and property records. One of the aims of the book is to link sources together to ensure that researchers can use material found in one source to assist a search in other sources. Another aim is to bring the reader up-to-date with the many important changes that have taken place in English genealogy over the last few years. These changes include the movement of census records and the indexes of births, marriages, and deaths to the new Family Records Centre at 1 Myddelton Street, London; the opening of the 1891 census; the placement of parish registers in county record offices; the transcription and indexing of census returns and parish records; and county and regional boundary changes. The scope of Herber's work is so thorough that it's worth looking at the table of contents, where chapter headings alone tell the tale: * An introduction to genealogical research In addition to the contents noted above, this new paperback edition contains a supplement of updated or amended information that has appeared since the publication of the original hardback edition in 1998, a new appendix containing web site addresses, and an expanded bibliography. And we are not alone in our admiration of this outstanding book. According to two distinguished authorities on English genealogy, Ancestral Trails stands head and shoulders above any other book in its field: "No other publication gives such comprehensive and up-to-date guidance on tracing British ancestry and researching family history. Illustrated throughout with more than ninety examples of the major types of records, and with detailed lists of further reading, Ancestral Trails will be the essential companion and guide for all family historians."--Anthony Camp, Director, Society of Genealogists "Ancestral Trails . . . goes beyond its predecessors and is comprehensive in its coverage in a way that they never even claimed to be. . . . In years to come Ancestral Trails may be referred to simply as "Herber," in the style of "Marshall" and "Whitmore." That would be the ultimate accolade, and richly deserved."--John Titford, Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies The Author Mark Herber is an attorney with the Serious Fraud Office in England. He has been researching his own family tree since 1979 and has traced some lines back to about 1580. 2692-G |