Have an account? Login
In your search for the family history, ‘cast your net wide’. Local newspaper offices or libraries can give you or get you copies of obituary notices which can give you multiple family history search leads. Obituary notices contain lots of useful information. If you are in any doubt, take a look at the Obits section of your local paper. In the older obituaries, longer write-ups are given on family members when they died telling about not only the person but about their life and in some cases about when their family line settled in a certain area of the country. Or you can Search the Obituary Collections at arcalife.com along side of more than a billion other family history records.
In both the US and the UK there are volunteer based initiatives to digitize and index Birth, marriage and death records for family history purposes. In the US you can refine your family history search by county, state and names. In the UK you can access the index of births, marriages, and deaths from England and Wales from 1837 to 1983. The free BMD database includes over 68 million family history records.
Giving is receiving, and family history is a great opportunity to share. Sharing is great but most other family historians want to at least verify the source of the family history information that you’ve shared. Credit should be given when you receive data from someone and then pass it on. It’s only fair that there is an accolade for the sweat and effort that went in to collecting the valuable family history data that you are about to share with someone else.
When hiring a family history expert it’s a good idea to get references from people who know the persons work or pick someone who has well know family history qualifications like the IHGS or membership of the history society. If you are paying for your family history its worth setting out to the person you are hiring what you are trying to achieve. Do you want to search back through your family line, look laterally for living family members, flesh out the history of a specific family member or explore a particular side of your family history first.
