Free Who Do You Think You Are? Encyclopedia of Genealogy by Nick Barratt Page A

popularity of the subject these days. Furthermore, many libraries hold important manuscript collections that are worth visiting in their own right, as well as important reference works that will play a crucial part in shaping your knowledge of how and where your ancestors lived. This is especially true at national level. The British Library in St Pancras, London, contains a copy of most books that have ever been published, but – as you will discover in Section Three – it also has a collection of genealogy records for people who lived in the British Empire, including records of baptism, marriage and burial in India. There are similar national libraries for Scotland (in Edinburgh), Wales (Aberystwyth), the Republic of Ireland (Dublin) and Northern Ireland (Belfast). Many academic libraries also hold important collections of primary evidence.
Museums
    Finally, do not forget to visit museums, both specialist – such as the National Railway Museum or National Coal Mining Museum (both featured in Who Do You Think You Are? when Sue Johnston and Lesley Garrett went looking for their ancestors) – and local, such as the Rochdale Museum where much research into Bill Oddie’s ancestors took place. Museums will be full not only of documents, but objects, artefacts, clothes, engines, machinery, books, sporting memorabilia – anything from the past that shows what life was like for your ancestors. This is where you will finally begin to understand the era in which your relatives lived, to encounter history up close, and find out about some of the events they lived through.
    Museums can also help you to identify some of the bits and pieces you’ve found during your own research within the family. Items of clothing or household objects can be taken to local museums or national ones such as the Victoria and Albert Museum (for clothing and textiles especially), where curators can help you date them. Military memorabilia such as medals can often be interpreted at places such as the Imperial War Museum.
How to Find an Archive
    There are various online databases to help you find libraries, archives, record offices, museums and repositories around the UK, and even around the world. Most of these allow you to enter the name of a place or use an interactive map to display a list of all the nearest archives to a particular area. The ARCHON Directory is perhaps one of the most useful databases to start with, and it’s available from The National Archives website at www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ archon. It contains addresses, telephone numbers, websites and street maps for local and major repositories all over the UK, the Republic of Ireland, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, and you can search by region or by entering the name of the place in which you’re interested. Visit the Scottish Archive Network (SCAN) at www.scan.org.uk/directory/index. htm to find an additional alphabetical directory of Scottish archives.
    If, as outlined earlier, you want to find out where the principal records of a particular landowning family are kept, the best way is to search the National Register of Archives, now part of The National Archives. You can view their paper indexes in person at their main search room at Kew, but a quicker route is to key the name of the landowning family into their online database at www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/nra and click on ‘Family Name’. You will then be given a list of all archives holding relevant material. So if you were looking for a connection to the Marquess of Sligo, as actor John Hurt was, you could type in ‘Sligo’ and quickly learn that relevant records were stored in the National Library of Ireland.
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Working in Archives
    To recap, your next step after building your family tree is to verify the information you’ve got. Then you can extend the tree further back in time and, by following a particular branch of the family or story, investigate the historical