Learning about THE RECORDS

There are many factors that can affect how family history research might be carried out, but the greatest enemies that most of us will face within our ancestral pursuits are ignorance and prejudices about the collections we seek to use. One of the most useful skills that we can acquire as aspiring historians is to determine when such obstacles are real, and when they are blockages that we may have placed in the way ourselves, subconsciously, inadvertently, and at times because we simply do not fully understand the records that we are examining.

So many records have been digitised and placed online now that we can be easily seduced into the habit of simply looking for hits on a database, and then conclude that if the information we seek is not found then it must not have been recorded. Alternatively, if we do locate something, we may be seduced into thinking that this is all that there is to be found. This may or may not be the case, but simply trusting that the companies hosting the records have placed everything online concerning a particular topic is a very bad habit to get into. Similarly, for records that are held in archives and libraries which have not been digitised, it can be a folly to trust that an institution holds all the records from a particular source, when there