Lynne Butler

Build Your Family Tree (eBook, ePUB)

A Guide For Canadians With Local And Global Roots

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Take your geneaology research to the next level by completing your ancestral story with historical will and probate records. Often, when you research your family tree, you can find only basic facts about ancestors, such as birth, marriage, and death dates. Sometimes, you can figure out a bit more from these records such as their religion, occupation, and names of some other family members. While all of these facts are crucial to your research, they do not paint much of a picture of your family members as people. For those who want to dig deeper and really get to know their ancestors, Build Your Family Tree explains how a will or probate record can offer a much more robust image of lives lived and legacies left. Wills are underused in genealogy research. This may be because many family genealogists use primarily online sources for research and most wills are not found online; it could also be because the documents are usually in old, unfamiliar, handwritten script and are not easy to read. With a little work, you could uncover some surprises or a treasure trove of information. Even genealogy enthusiasts who are willing to look for wills may not fully appreciate just how useful probate and related records can be. In this book you will find an explanation of what sorts of probate records exist and where to find them. You will find definitions of the terminology used in probate records, including latin words and phrases and legal terms that are common to this type of resource. Once you know what is in a physical archive and how to view those records, you are able to take your information about your ancestors to a new level. The story of your family could be different than you imagined. Are you ready to find out how?

---

Dieser Download kann aus rechtlichen Gründen nur mit Rechnungsadresse in A, D ausgeliefert werden.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Self-Counsel Press
• Seitenzahl: 248
• Erscheinungstermin: 15. Oktober 2022
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781770405363
• Artikelnr.: 67320686

Autorenporträt

I'm writing because I had an idea for a new book called Using Historic Wills and Probate Records to Build Your Family Tree. This idea grew out of an invitation I had some time ago from the local family history society to give a talk on the subject. I mentioned the general topic of using wills as a resource in some genealogy groups that I'm in (Facebook etc) and it generated quite a bit of interest. I think, based on feedback from those groups and from my presentation, that people underestimate how much genealogical information they can find in wills and in any event they simply don't know where to find the wills. I should also mention that a couple of years ago I self-published a book about 19th century wills in Newfoundland called "Sound Mind and Memory". It was basically a history of how we got where we are now with wills and probate law. Though a book like that is never going to be a best-seller, it created a satisfying stir among local historians and I got some fabulous positive feedback from them, I mention this really to demonstrate how much time I've spent digging through dusty old wills for research purposes. I've attached an outline of what I think the book should cover. As always, I expect I'll think of more sub-topics as I go, but it's pretty detailed.. Originally as I developed this outline I considered talking about searching international sources as well as Canadian, given that everyone came from somewhere else. I ended up removing those potential chapters because the topic was getting so big. Searching international sources could almost be books of their own. What do you think about including international searches? When I presented the topic locally, I concentrated on Canadian and UK sources because our local population is so homogenous. My question, though, would be where to draw the line. After all, Canada has immigrants from every country and continent. As always, I want this book to be practical and a really useful guide for people. I've often checked for books on this topic. I have found several American ones but so far not a Canadian one. Given that our legal and court systems are nothing like the Americans, those books are of no value to anyone wanting to search Canadian records. I realize that Self-Counsel books are known for their "extras" that come in the download. I have at least two checklists to add that I already use myself. One is a summary of a found will where I record what was in the will (variations on the name, relationships, date, place, occupation, citation/location of the will, etc). Attached to that is a "check next" list where I make quick notes about new clues to follow up as a result of reading the will. Then I check them off as I do them. The second resembles an excerpt from a family tree in that it starts with the testator in the middle then names any people/relations that were mentioned in the will. This makes it easy to pop the new info right into the overall family tree that the searcher is presumably working on. I also anticipate creating lists and/or charts of various sources broken down by province. This could be really handy using the download because it could include links to click on. I see this book as complementary to services like ancestry. Yes, they might find a will on the site, but would they know what they were looking at? Would they get the most out of that document that they could? This is especially true of probate documents that are usually written in shorthand that may not make a lot of sense without guidance. Perhaps knowing that a will or probate record can be such a goldmine might encourage more people to seek out that kind of record. I also hope that the book will open all kinds of doors for people who have been through a couple of big sites, didn't find that much, and don't really know where else to look. The big sites only have a limited number of wills and many are American. There are treasure-troves of wills on smaller sites (e.g Chebucto Grand Banks site has tons of NL wills not found on the big sites). I don't know if people realize the value of hunting down those smaller sites and what great info they can find there.