SUMMARY
Online sources of information include:
• Dataset websites, such as those of national and local archives, newspapers and commercial organizations, providing digital collections of records
• Portal websites, for advice, information and links to other websites and collections
• Forums, communities and mailing lists, for subscribers to share information and research
If you would rather avoid the constant emails generated by mailing lists, but still like the idea of joining an online community, take a look at the Nations Memory Bank (NMB) website where you can become a member of one of the Family, Military, House, Fashion, and Local, National Trust or Food communities at www.nationsmemorybank. co.uk. NMB is a digital archive of all of our memories, not just family history, where photos can be uploaded and memories of different events relating to the images are placed on a memory map and discussed by other users in the forums. For example, you can post a picture of your family and ask other users of the site to help you name the people in it, or provide stories about what they were like. This is a great website for learning from other people’s experiences, and you can search for key words to find memories about a topic or place of interest relevant to your research. NMB is also a brilliant space for storing your own research. If you have recorded an interview with an elderly relative, why not transcribe that interview and store it as a memory on the site so that other users can read and learn from their recollections? (However, remember to seek the permission of the interviewee before putting their life story in the public domain.)
Internet Etiquette and Problems Associated with Online Genealogy
Experienced genealogists have voiced their concerns over the past few years about the increasing reliance on Internet resources as opposed to traditional methods of research. Whilst this largely stemmed at first from a reluctance to adapt to new technology, they have raised some very valid points.
Millions of original documents, catalogues and indexes have been digitized so that they can be searched online quickly and from the comfort of your own home, but this has led to a misapprehension that it is now possible to research an entire family tree on the Internet. This is certainly not the case, and although most of the key ‘first step’ resources are now online, only a very small percentage of the entire range of original documents useful to genealogists is available from the Internet. You will be required to make many trips to various archives, but this is all part of the fun.
Before you can even begin taking advantage of the many records that are online, you will probably need to research your family tree offline for at least a few generations before the Internet records are of any real use. The majority of records online pertain to the nineteenth century, mainly because many more recent sources (such as the vast majority of twentieth-century censuses) are ‘closed’ – that is, they are not available to be made public – because they contain sensitive personal information about individuals who could be still alive. More datasets for the twentieth century are now becoming available, however, such as phonebooks and directories, though these alone will not be enough to trace back a branch – only place them in one location at a given time. Online records for earlier eras are also scant, mainly because there are no centralized indexes for resources like parish registers and wills proved in county courts, making the task of putting them all online a very large-scale and time-consuming one.
‘The majority of records online pertain to the nineteenth century.’
Common Problems Working Online
Aside from the documents you may not be able to locate on the Internet, the ones that are available online come with their own set of problems. For a start, do not expect to locate online sources for your ancestors by simply typing their name into a major search engine like Google, Ask Jeeves, or Yahoo! While this will sometimes yield results if you are very lucky or if an ancestor was particularly famous, most will need to be found using a site-specific search engine, which requires that you first locate the relevant website. This is best done by starting with a source such as GENUKI or Cyndi’s List, described earlier.
Specialist search engines allow you to search the website’s online indexes either by keyword, surname, date or place. They will often have been created by people who have manually transcribed words from the original documents into computer software. While this is part of the beauty of Internet research, allowing you to find what you are looking for instantly without the need to consult card indexes or scroll through every page of a document to find a particular name, databases create problems of their own. There are many errors in the transcriptions that can make locating the entry you want difficult. These errors are usually because the person doing the transcribing was not able to read the original old handwriting very well. For example, if you were looking for Adam Benny on the census, his name may have been wrongly transcribed into the computer’s index as something similar, such as ‘Alan Remy’, in which case it would be difficult to locate this entry using a name search. There are tips on how to overcome some of these common errors throughout the book under the relevant subject headings, but if you find it very difficult locating records that should be online, then you will have to consult the original indexes or records at the archives.
Reliability: Checking Sources Online
As has been mentioned many times before, if you do find other researchers willing to share their findings with you online, whether through a family tree sharing site or a forum, make sure to always ask them how and where they found their sources so that you can double-check them yourself and ascertain their accuracy. There are thousands of people working in the online community who will hopefully be able to help you when you are stuck, but there is always the possibility that they have made errors too. This advice goes for websites set up by enthusiasts as well – plenty of people have now mastered the art of compiling their family history onto a personalized website, but there are no official checks to ensure all information published online is accurate, so it is important to carry out your own checks on their data. You can usually establish whether or not a website belongs to an accredited organization or a private individual from the URL address (i.e. the www. website address). If the address ends in ‘gov.uk’ this means it has been set up by a government organization, and those ending in ‘ac.uk’ belong to academic institutes, therefore their content should be reliable. Look out for the website administrator’s contact details so that you can get in touch with them should you need to qualify the validity of their data.
‘If you publish your family tree on a website or online, be aware of the various copyright laws that protect information supplied to you by other researchers or publications.’
Citations and Copyright
When incorporating online sources into your research it is vital that you cite those sources with the same attention to detail as you would for original documents from the archives. Include the full web address and details about the dataset or the owner of the site’s material. If you are considering publishing your family tree on a website or online using a family tree sharing facility, you must be cautious of the various copyright laws that protect information supplied to you by other researchers or publications. Any information you have found from databases online or on CD-ROM, or that has been supplied to you by other researchers’ websites, forum or mailing list postings, is protected by copyright, and therefore you should not replicate this data without first obtaining the owner’s permission.
SUMMARY
Problems associated with online genealogy:
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