4 Go Fishing!

As well as key datasets, such as census, birth, marriage and death records, there are more and more unusual records being indexed and transcribed. We cover many of these new datasets in the magazine and our free weekly email newsletter( signup at who do you think you are magazine. com), but it’s important that you don’t miss them, especially if they are not with a genealogy website that you subscribe to.

Once you know a family and a period that you are going to focus on, look around for relevant datasets. Although they may be on commercial websites, they may also be freely available via archives’ websites or the websites of family history societies. David Walliams discovered that the health inspectors were visiting the vans owned by his fairground ancestors via the Wellcome Library’s online collection of Medical Officer reports ( wellcomelibrary.org/ moh). It’s also worth typing a name into various archive catalogues (including discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk) to see what you might find. Remember that records are being indexed and transcribed all the time, so just because you have checked somewhere before and had no luck, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t check again.