Background
In the course of my family research I have concentrated solely on my paternal line. My maternal line has already been well researched by other family members, and there is much of interest in my paternal line that has yet to be discovered in records distributed across the UK, Germany, Poland and Australia. Prior to the advent of the internet this made research extremely difficult. Thankfully the archive services in all four countries have done much to digitise their catalogues and records to enable significant research to be carried out from home.
Useful archives
The National Archives [UK]
TNA of course hold vast quantities of official UK records which can be seen either on their website or by visiting the Public Records Office at Kew. Some of the more popular products (most notably the ten-yearly census and the 1939 National Registration Act) are only available via online aggregators such as Find My Past and Ancestry for a fee.
Births, marriages and deaths [UK]
Births, marriages and deaths since 1st July 1837 are held by the General Register Office, part of His Majesty’s Passport Office. They can be searched for free at freebmd.org.uk, and copy certificates can be ordered from the GRO for a fee.
Other useful archives in my research
- Army Records Office
- Arolsen Archives
- Brisbane General Registry
- British Library
- Essex Record Office (part of Essex County Council)
- Jewish Gen
- London Metropolitan Archives (part of the City of London Corporation)
- Mannheim University Library
- Principal Probate Registry (part of HM Courts and Tribunals Service)
- RAF Records Office
- Standesamt (Germany)
- The London Gazette
Narrated family tree
To collect, catalogue and store information I use the Gramps geneaological research software. Gramps allows the family history researcher to apply a common structure based around the following headings:
- people, incorporating individuals, families, relationships and events;
- information, incorporating repositories, sources and citations;
- places and geography;
- media, incorporating photographs, scanned documents and images, and documents obtained through internet research.
Gramps can also produce a narrated family tree which can be exported from the system and uploaded to an internet web site such as this one. The narrated family tree makes it easy to share research from Gramps on the internet in a straightforward, interesting and accessible way.
View my narrated family tree if you have the requisite username and password.
