A practical and comprehensive work on reading and translating old handwriting and abbreviations, particularly medieval and Latin writing, with examples and commentary.
Once genealogists and local historians have learned everything they can from internet sources, the next step is reading and understanding older documents. The author details how to find and comprehend documents in England, Wales and Scotland from 1560 to 1860. These can be hard to find, are often written in challenging handwriting and use Latin, antiquated English or Scots.
The Oxford Companion to Family and Local History is the most authoritative guide available to all things associated with the family and local history of the British Isles. It provides practical and contextual information for anyone enquiring into their English, Irish, Scottish, or Welsh origins and for anyone working in genealogical research, or the social history of the British Isles. This fully revised and updated edition contains over 2,000 entries from adoption to World War records. Recommended web links for many entries are accessed and updated via the Family and Local History companion website. This edition provides guidance on how to research your family tree using the internet and details the full range of online resources available. Newly structured for ease of use, thematic articles are followed by the A-Z dictionary and detailed appendices, which includefurther reading. New articles for this edition are: A Guide for Beginners, Links between British and American Families, Black and Asian Family History, and an extended feature on Names. With handy research tips, a full background to the social history of communities and individuals, and an updated appendix listing all national and local record offices with their contact details, this is an essential reference work for anyone wanting advice on how to approach genealogical research, as well as a fascinating read for anyone interested in the past.
This book is designed to teach you how to read and understand the handwriting found in documents commonly used in genealogical research. It explains techniques for reading early American documents, provides samples of alphabets and letter forms, and defines terms and abbreviations commonly used in early American documents such as wills, deeds, and church records.
This is the very first 'teach yourself' book on palaeography, covering all the skills that the genealogist needs to read any document that might be found at any date in English archives. Using a series of graded exercises in transcription, Teach Yourself Palaeography works backwards in time in easy stages from the modern handwriting of the nineteenth century to the court hands of the medieval period, focusing on records that are of particular interest to family and local historians. The book provides a unique, self-contained reference guide to palaeography, and to all the different letter forms, symbols and abbreviations that have ever been used in English records.
How has the place we live in changed, developed, and grown over the centuries? That is the basic question local historians seek to answer. The answer is to be found in the sources of information that previous generations have left us. The records of parish, county, and diocesan administration, of the courts, of the national government, and of private estates, all have something to tell us about the history of the locality we are interested in. So do old newspapers and other publications. All of these sources are readily available, but many have been little used. Local historians come from a wide diversity of backgrounds. But whether you are a student researching a dissertation, a family historian interested in the wider background history of your family, a teacher, a librarian, an archivist, an academic, or are merely interested in the history of your own area, this book is for you. If you want to research local history, you need a detailed account of the myriad sources readily available. This book provides a comprehensive overview of those sources, and its guidance will enable you to explore and exploit their vast range. It poses the questions which local historians ask, and identifies the specific sources likely to answer those questions.
Latin is the language of a vast quantity of untouched source material. Despite the widespread popular interest in research into local and family history there has been no recent textbook to help the beginner to cope with the great barrier preventing access to that wealth of information--medieval Latin. This book remedies the omission. It embodies the author's experience as a university teacher of Latin and local history over 20 years, deriving from the notes and material developed for the Latin examination in the local history certificate courses which he organized. After dealing with the basic grammar of Latin, this very practical book examines the structure and vocabulary of the records use in local and family research, including Episcopal visitation, church court records, sepulchral inscriptions, wills, manorial court rolls, charters, and deeds. A final chapter explains the abbreviations used in medieval Latin. The book is complete in itself and contains al the necessary tables of declensions and conjugations plus a glossary of more than 800 words. The book is uniquely user-friendly, as the pace of instruction is never rushed, and the passages for translation are carefully graded for grammar and vocabulary and selected both for their intrinsic interest and for their representative character. The reader who works systematically through the book will be equipped to handle the Latin of the documents encountered by the do-it-yourself local or family historian.
Property title deeds are perhaps the most numerous sources of historical evidence but also one of the most neglected. While the information any one deed contains can often be reduced to a few lines, it can be of critical importance for family and local historians. Nat Alcock's handbook aims to help the growing army of enthusiastic researchers to use the evidence of these documents, without burying them in legal technicalities. It also reveals how fascinating and rewarding they can be once their history, language and purpose are understood. A sequence of concise, accessible chapters explains why they are so useful, where they can be found and how the evidence they provide can be extracted and applied. Family historians will find they reveal family, social and financial relationships and local historians can discover from them so much about land ownership, field and place names, the history of buildings and the expansion of towns and cities. They also bring our ancestors into view in the fullness of life, not just at birth, marriage and death, and provide more rounded pictures of the members of a family tree.
This is a comprehensive, illustrated guide to tracing British ancestry, equally suitable for beginners and those who have already started the search for their roots. The book guides the researcher for their roots. The book guides the researcher through the substantial British archives with a detailed finding aids or indexes. the early chapters include advice on obtaining information from relatives, drawing on family trees and starting research in the records of births, marriages and deaths, or in census records; later chapters guide researchers to the records that are ore that are more difficult to find and use, such as legal and property records.
This book is the ideal companion for anybody researching their family tree. It provides advice and inspiration on methods and problem-solving and helps the amateur family historian understand what successful professionals do to get results, and why we should copy them. Over ten chapters, it examines the various themes that affect the success or failure of all genealogy research. This begins with an overview of common challenges genealogists encounter and continues with an examination of how to both search effectively and find the right documentary sources. Using examples from her own family history as well as client work, teacher and professional genealogist Helen Osborn demonstrates how to get the most from documents, analyse problems and build research plans. These subjects lead on to recording results, how to ensure relationships are correctly proved, organizing information and presenting your findings. This book will be particularly valuable to anyone who is stuck with their research, in addition to those who are keen to learn about advanced skills and methods used by genealogists.