Robert Burlison - Tracing Your Pauper Ancestors: A Guide for Family Historians

The Internet had revolutionised family history research. It is now easier than ever to find information or share an interest with others. Most family history societies have their own website and there are an estimated 20,000 mailing groups devoted to genealogy. National, metropolitan and local record offices, together with local study centres, also have online facilities. These are posting transcriptions of primary records, or at least indexes of them, on the Internet seemingly by the minute. Poor Law records are particularity well served in this way. The Access 2 Archives (A2A) search engine ( www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/a2a/ ) provides a link to provincial and national searchable databases that will enable you to identify ancestors who were, for example, served with removal notices, settlement certificates or bastardy bonds. Individual parish accounts can also be identified and located alongside details of the thousands of charities and philanthropic organisations that provided (or still provide) succour to the poor.

Such has been the growth of online genealogical material that information on sources is in danger of rapidly becoming out of date. The same can be said of website addresses. Those mentioned in the book were accurate at the time of going to press, but web pages come and go and if you find any that fail then the answer can often be found when using a search engine such as Google ( www.google.co.uk ). Alternatively, a particularly helpful book that lists useful websites is Peter Christians frequently revised The Genealogists Internet , published by The National Archives (see Appendix 3). One of the best places for family historians to start searching the World Wide Web is by using gateway sites such as GENUKI ( www.genuki.org.uk ), which hosts a comprehensive collection of website links, not only to pages devoted to individual topics, but also to county record offices, national archives and local family history societies. If your genealogical interests extend beyond the British Isles then the equivalent website is Cyndis list at www.cyndislist.com . You will not, however, find a great deal of information online about individual ancestors who were born in the twentieth century. It is only when you go back 100 years, and outside the scope of current privacy restrictions, that source material becomes available on the Internet.

I have assumed readers will have Internet access at home, but if you do not then many municipal libraries and local study centres have installed computers linked to the World Wide Web. Local education authorities also regularly provide computer (and family history) courses as part of their range of daytime or evening classes in leisure and activity pursuits. That said, it is of course still perfectly possible to undertake family history without the use of a computer. But the principal advantage of the Internet, alongside its pages of help, advice and information, is that it offers the ability to check electronically on the holdings of record offices and libraries so that any visit can be better prepared and more productive. Family historians who live some distance from their ancestors home parish, and therefore often the geographical location of any records, will particularly benefit when copies of documents can, for a modest fee, be ordered by post or email; the Internet, to quote from one website, provides a happy and fulfilling marriage between the virtual and the solid.