Looking for a quick reference book on Canadian genealogy, take a look at Ryan Taylor’s The Canadian Genealogical Sourcebook. The topics covered for each province and territory include: directories, census, wills and probate, land records, and repositories.
Where possible address, website and email are provided for the national, regional and local repositories.
What I especially like is that the Sourcebook explains how the data is recorded in each province, especially for Quebec.
This book is current out of print and might be available at used bookstore vendors.
Genealogy is a field that you can not play in alone. Sharing knowledge, providing assistance, being a sounding board, are all characteristics of the majority of genealogists I know. Add to these characteristics the use of social networking online… well genealogists will never need to be without someone to talk to.
Social networking has grown greatly with the addition of Facebook, Blogs, Wikis to mailing lists, message boards and when possible actual face to face dialog.
Drew Smith’s Social Networking for Genealogists covers these social networking opportunities and some that I have yet to venture into (i.e. Podcasting).
No longer does a genealogist have to wait for snail mail from fellow genealogists when things get tough and the brickwall just seems to get thicker, a quick post on Facebook, for example, and feedback will start flowing in.
When I looked at my first courthouse index, shock and confusion are my strongest memories. How was I suppose to find a person hopefully listed in this index if I could not even figure out how to use the index.
Indexes are suppose to be straight forward. Sure you might have to look for alternative words to find what you are looking for, but in most cases, you go in alphabetical order. Not so in some courthouse indexes. The cryptic method of finding a person can make for what started as a nice genealogical research day into a nightmare.
Come forward in time, finding Courthouse Indexes Illustrated by Christine Rose, and reading how to navigate these indexes has made courthouse research so much easier. Knowing that not all courthouse follow the same system, understanding that indexers may have recorded the entry you seek in a different order than what you had assumed, and accepting that not all indexes survive, has made for more productive courthouse research trips.
Abbreviations and acronyms are everywhere and depending on the context, they can mean different things to different people. When I entered the working world, every time I started a new career there was a whole new list of abbreviations to learn. Genealogy is no different.
Abbreviations and Acronyms: Guide for Family Historians by Kip Sperry has provided me with a starting point with some of these. Now, if everyone could be consistent and abbreviations could only be used once, that would be wonderful. Not going to happen, and with that, I still have to look at the context to determine what the abbreviation is referring to. So instead of thinking all genealogists were using a Global Positioning System (GPS) they were actually following the Genealogical Proof Standard (GPS).
And yes, Kentucky can be seen as KEN or KY in different records.
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