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Post your information including the family histories you are looking for on our history discussion forum. Family historians get together at the forum to discuss research methods and exchange material. You may get lucky and find missing family member or family history artifact. You don’t have much to lose from posting in many places and seeing what you can turn up but be careful what you post. It’s best not to post your home address or home phone online on open forums. If you want you can exchange further details using the secure arcalife message centre.
The family history comments and citations log in the tab of each family member should contain key information. Later on in your family history research you may decide to share your data or even publish your work and you’ll need to know your sources for obtaining and verifying the information within your family history lines. Showing the basics like name, birth, death, married, spouse is great but for example if you found the persons birth certificate show the date you found it, birth certificate number, the source, quoting file numbers, source name and addresses, authors, titles, pages and publishers.
Graveyards and cemeteries are a prime place to dig up more information. Visit the cemetery that you know your ancestors are buried in and look for other family members. It’s a good idea to take a record of the info from the tombstones. Taking a note of wider information that isn’t directly related to your blood line may still be useful later if you hit a family history dead-end, giving you another avenue of family history research. You may not get to visit this cemetery frequently or more than once so it pays to have it recorded. You could use a digital camera to save time recording family history information from the headstones.
Birth records are very important to family historians but recent birth records are more difficult to obtain because privacy law often prohibits the public release of such information until it can be confirmed that individuals died or such time has passed that it is not possible for them to still be living. One thing to look out for when you are using birth records for family history is that there are usually three types; original records that are unchanged and were registered at the time of birth, amended birth records which have been modified, corrected or have new family history information added, and Postponed or delayed – These represent family history records that were issued some time after the birth event as the certificate was not created or registered at that time.
