How to Trace Your Family Tree

by Kathy Chater

The complete practical handbook for researching your family history, heritage and genealogy

Genres: Nonfiction, Reference

264 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Linda Hartlaub · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent book to aid in research in the U.K. The book slants heavily towards England, but there are gems to aid research in Wales, Ireland and Scotland, too. A lot of finding aids, a lot of website links. This book is printed in England; therefore, if you are ordering from Amazon, be prepared to wait for several weeks until it makes it here. When I received it, I knew it was well worth the wait.

[Rachel Pieters · Rating 3 out of 5]

This slim, highly visual book would be very useful for anyone researching ancestors from the United Kingdom, though it's slightly outdated.

That said, I did make some useful research notes from the text, and several of the websites, which must have been pretty new when this book was written, are still relevant and useful.

Interesting little notes and tips, some I'd never thought of.

Worth checking out, though a very narrow scope.

[Kathy · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was somewhat informative, but a bit outdated. I really didn't learn anything new as far as researching my family's genealogy.

[Deborah · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was useful as back up to genelogy course I was doing

[Graham · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thorough guide to family history research for the beginner. The first thing you notice is that this book is very well laid out and pleasing to look at, with plenty of colour and black and white illustrations on every page, lots of white space, information boxes and details broken down into short, manageable chunks.

Topics covered including: economy, society, record finding, warfare, immigration and plenty more besides. The idea is to point you in the right direction so you can go off and find what you need.

My only complaint is that, ten years later, this book is somewhat dated. It's fine when it comes to the physical stuff, but there's little mention of Internet research (only then starting to become useful). As somebody who does their entire research online this is nowadays a little lacking.

[Stephen Coates · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is a guidebook for tracing one’s family tree in the British Isles. The topics covered, such as adoption, military service, education, wills, occupations, parish registries, migrations etc are comprehensive and cites many sources including institutional libraries and archives open to the public, published guidebooks and Internet sites. It would be of particular use to persons living in the British Isles or travelling to them. However, one disappointment is that many of the Internet sites cited are no longer in operation.