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Genealogy - our guide to finding you family roots
There are a large number of excellent websites devoted to helping researchers understand how they might go about discovering the family roots. It is not our intention to repeat what may be presented elsewhere. However, we do provide some links to sites which can help you (See list of contents for the genealogy section, below).
What we do intend to do is indicate some of the material we have used, and some we probably should have used if only we had known about them sooner!
Genealogists use a wide variety of records in their research. To effectively conduct genealogical research, it is important to understand how the records were created, what information is included in them, and how and where to access them.
To keep track of their citizens, governments began keeping records of persons who were neither royalty nor nobility. In much of Europe, for example, such record keeping started in the 16th century. As more of the population was recorded, there were sufficient records to follow a family.
Major life events, such as births, marriages, and deaths, were often documented with a license, permit, or report. Genealogists locate these records in local, regional or national offices or archives and extract information about family relationships and recreate timelines of persons' lives.
In Ireland, genealogical records were recorded by professional families of senchaidh (historians) until as late as the mid-17th century, when Gaelic civilization died out. Perhaps the most outstanding example of this genre is Leabhar na nGenealach/The Great Book of Irish Genealogies, by Dubhaltach MacFhirbhisigh (d. 1671), published in 2004.
The family tree of Confucius has been maintained for over 2,500 years, and is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the largest extant family tree. The fifth edition of the Confucius Genealogy was printed in 2009 by the Confucius Genealogy Compilation Committee (CGCC).
Data sharing among genealogical researchers has grown to be a major use of the Internet. Most genealogy software programs (such as Legacy, which we use) can export information about persons and their relationships in GEDCOM format, so it can be shared with other genealogists by e-mail and Internet forums, added to an online databases, such as TNG, the software we use for our database, or converted into a family web site. Many genealogical software applications also facilitate the sharing of information via CD-ROMs and DVDs.
Social networking service (SNS) websites allow genealogists to share data and build their family trees online. Members can upload their family trees and contact other family historians to fill in gaps in their research. Our SNS is www.douglashistory.co.uk/community
See also: Extreme
genealogy
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The content of this website is a collection of materials gathered from a variety of sources, some of it unedited. The webmaster does not intend to claim authorship, but gives credit to the originators for their work. As work progresses, some of the content may be re-written and presented in a unique format, to which we would then be able to claim ownership. Discussion and contributions from those more knowledgeable is welcome. Last modified: Monday, 25 March 2024 |