Tracing Your Family History on the Internet: A Guide for Family Historians (Tracing Your Ancestors)

This fully revised second edition of Chris Paton’s best-selling guide is essential reading if you want to make effective use of the internet in your family history research. Every day new records and resources are placed online and new methods of sharing research and communicating across cyberspace become available, and his handbook is the perfect introduction to them. He has checked and updated all the links and other sources, added new ones, written a new introduction and substantially expanded the social networking section.

Never before has it been so easy to research family history using the internet, but he demonstrates that researchers need to take a cautious approach to the information they gain from it. They need to ask, where did the original material come from and has it been accurately reproduced, why was it put online, what has been left out and what is still to come? As he leads the researcher through the multitude of resources that are now accessible online, he helps to answer these questions. He shows what the internet can and cannot do, and he warns against the various traps researchers can fall into along the way.

Chris Paton is a genealogist and writer based in Ayrshire. He runs the Scotland’s Greatest Story research service at www.scotlandsgreateststory.co.uk. He is a regular writer for several British and Irish genealogy magazines, runs the British GENES news and events blog at www.BritishGENES.blogspot.com, and gives regular talks to local family history societies and internationally.