When we’re researching our family histories, we spend a lot of our time looking at the key sources. We track down records of our ancestors’ births, marriages and deaths, we try to find them in census returns and we look for their wills.
And as part of that process, we naturally become familiar with the records that we’re using. If we’re doing our jobs properly, we’ll find out as much as we can about them:
- why and how they were compiled
- what they were used for at the time
- and why they were retained.
But there’s a danger that we get too fixated on these key sources and don’t pay enough attention to the wealth of other material that’s out there. Thanks to some extensive digitisation projects over the last few decades, access to many of these less-well-known sources is now much easier than it’s ever been before. Thousands of records relating to taxation, apprenticeships, criminal trials, immigration/emigration and much more are now easily accessible on the major commercial genealogical websites and we can quickly find references to our ancestors in them.
