Genealogy: Researching Your Family Tree

What's Included

• A consideration of the differences between primary, derived primary and secondary sources.
• An understanding of the importance of knowing who made a document and why and how they were created. *A key challenge of genealogy – finding the right person among a number of possible candidates, with ever-changing spellings of surnames – will be considered.
• Lateral ways to approach research including the FAN/cluster technique and mind mapping.
• Primary source databases including searching techniques to deal with name change or spelling differences; these include the use of wildcards.
• An introduction to main source types including civil, church, census and military records to give a sense of the typical type of data these records contain and how to use them.
• Review the content of major international and selected local and specialised databases and consider ways to evaluate databases.