Tracing Your Ancestors’ Lives
by Barbara J Starmans
Pen & Sword, 224 pages, £14.99
Unlike other titles in Pen & Sword’s Tracing Your Ancestors series that look at specific occupations, records or localities, Barbara Starmans’ new book is more general. It does not claim to be a comprehensive guide to social history, but instead explores various aspects that will be of interest to family historians.
If you’ve only recently started tracing your family tree, it’s tempting to try and fill in as many of the branches as you can with names and dates, and to go back as far as possible into the past. You might end up with an impressive-looking tree, but you’ll be no closer to understanding who your ancestors were and what their lives were like.
At some point, you’ll want to find out more about your forebears as people, for example, their occupations and working conditions, the housing they lived in, and their hobbies and beliefs. Tracing Your Ancestors’
Lives is designed to guide you through the process of studying your family’s social history. The book is well written and researched, and it’s clearly structured so it’s easy to dip in and out of. This makes it very accessible, giving it a broad appeal. It will be invaluable to the beginner thinking about social history for the first time, and it also offers numerous ideas for further research to those who are more experienced.
A key strength of the book is the series of 30 case studies the author has written using a variety of records. They tell the stories of real people affected by topics such as the Industrial Revolution, the Sheffield Flood, baby farmers, public health and child labour.
The illustrations are a little disappointing as there aren’t many period photographs, but that doesn’t detract from what is a very useful addition to the family historian’s bookshelf. Michelle Higgs is an author specialising in social history