Book Review: Solving Genealogy Problems by Dr Graeme Davis

Within the space of a couple of hundred pages, Dr. Davis provides a book that is not only a brilliant read, but also utterly insightful.

This book deals with specific brickwalls and potential solutions, for instance, how to find BMD marriages and different census solutions. This also includes finding, using, and what to expect from parish records and newspaper archives, along with other resources.

My Genealogy Progress Report - April 2015

Time seems to be speeding along at the moment. My baby is due in the next couple of weeks and we've been putting the finishing touches to his nursery and sorting some other areas of the house.

We've both also been getting on with our family trees. My wife has been loaned lots of items from her mum, which I've been scanning and organising record sheets for and I've been continuing my quest to delve deeper into the Havenith side of the family.

Around 5-6 years ago I was given a few sheets of paper that showed the Havenith side of the family going back into Belgium to around 1610 from a distant relative via my Opa. While some of the records I've found don't exactly match the details I was given, it's close enough to give me some confidence that I'm heading in the right direction.

Looking at records for Belgium, which also consists of German records due to the administration at the time of my ancestors lives, has been an interesting challenge. I enlisted the help of a genealogy group on Facebook, who I'll write about in a future post, and they've been very helpful. I'm starting to get to grips with FamilySearch better and have started to learn the arch.be website when looking for records. While this can be a slow process, it's wonderful to finally see the names you're looking for appear on a BMD record - something that makes the hours spent worthwhile.

As our first anniversary is coming up, we decided to follow tradition and get each other paper gifts. We both chose records of our ancestors! I'm really hoping that these records help us develop a stronger feeling of connectedness to each other and with our ancestors.

I'm looking forward to writing more about my journey into the past and starting to feel much more confident about the whole process.

When our baby is born there may well be a gap in posting, but I'll be back to posting as soon as possible.

How Are We Related?

Ever get confused with how you're related to someone? If you're like me, you rely on your genealogy application to tell you your relationship to some obscure ancestor from 200 years ago.

However, I think it's time that I get a better grip on understanding the basics, so I don't have to rely FTM all the time. So, I was very happy when Mark at Crestleaf emailed me their infographic, below.

I find it well laid out and easy to understand, especially the once/twice/thrice removed business, which this chart shows me is a matter of finding the nearest common relative and then working out the number of generations from myself.

Hopefully you'll find it useful too!