Ancestral Trails. The Complete Guide to British Genealogy and Family History

It is an irony that there has been no comprehensive book on English genealogy; it is even somewhat astonishing that there is no book that guides the researcher beyond the rudiments of genealogical research, no book that enables the researcher to forge iron- clad links to original source material and published sources, nor any single work that can be called the Bible of English genealogy, on a par with Val Greenwood's Researcher's Guide to American Genealogy. But now, with the publication of Ancestral Trails by Mark Herber, a work published in association with the Society of Genealogists (London), a definitive text on English genealogy is at last available.

Lavishly illustrated and breathtaking in coverage, Ancestral Trails guides the researcher through the maze of 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. So the book is ideal for the beginner and the experienced researcher alike, and will enable those who are persistent enough to trace their ancestry back to the Middle Ages.

One of the aims of the book--entirely unique to it--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, somewhat more modest but equally essential, 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. Anything even slightly affecting your research is thus dealt with and brought up-to-date, making the book an essential reference and an indispensable field manual. 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
* Personal recollections, photographs, memorabilia
* Organization of your research materials
* General problems in locating and using records
* Civil registration of births, marriages, and deaths since 1837
* Census returns
* Parish registers
* Churchyards and cemeteries
* Directories
* Combining sources of information
* Record offices, libraries, archives, and family history societies
* Wills and administrations
* Roman Catholic, non-Conformist, and Jewish records
* Marriage and divorce
* Maps, land registration, introduction to property records
* Local and social history
* Newspapers, poll books, and electoral registers
* Records of the poor, parish records, and town records
* Records of the Army, Royal Marines, and Royal Air Force
* Records of shipping and seamen
* Records of trades and professions, family businesses, employment
* Oaths, taxation, and insurance records
* Records of the civil and ecclesiastical courts
* Records of Justices of the Peace, criminals, and criminal courts
* Education
* Peerages, the gentry, famous people, and heraldry
* Further property records
* Tracing migrants and locating living relatives
* Research in Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Isle of Man, Channel Isles
* Immigration, emigration, and investigations abroad

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.

Mark Herber is a solicitor. He has been researching his own family tree since 1979 and has traced some lines back to about 1580