Crafting a Personal Family History: A Guide Plus A Case Study of the Hinds Family in New York's Adir

Crafting a Personal Family History establishes the basic principles necessary to successfully research and document a person family history. In most cases only a fragmentary record of an ancestor's life will have survived, and those traces will tend to cluster around only a few topics. So it is in the Hinds case study presented. Analysis of those traces is essential: so analysis is made transparent in the text. Other approaches are briefly presented in an appendix. Praise for Crafting a Personal Family History: Harold Hinds, in this ground-breaking and valuable textbook, applies his unsurpassed scholarship and experience as an academic historian to the fledgling field of personal family history. Providing both theory and practical example, Hinds makes a significant contribution that seekers of ancestors will find not only helpful, but enlightening. He has demonstrated vividly and convincingly that exploiting oft-neglected local and regional materials and analyzing them diligently in light of the time and place of their creation, can reveal -- even when the forebears are unexceptional folk from Ireland -- an engaging, often surprising, sometimes shocking family saga well worth telling. John Philip Colletta, Ph.D., author of Only a Few Bones About the Author: Harold E. Hinds, Jr is Distinguished Research Professor of History at the University of Minnesota-Morris