Research Tips

Broadly speaking, there are three ways you can go about researching your ancestors:

Hand everything over to a professional research provider. This can be quite expensive and you need to ensure that you use a researcher and define your budget in advance.
Spend hours ploughing through registers, census returns, and other historical material. You can end up with many sleepless nights doing this sort of thing if you are not careful! Be warned - this process can become highly addictive!
Use a more "personal" approach - interview your relatives, gather the information they provide, place it on a website, and wait until other people find your website and supply further information.

The third method is the most fun and brings you into contact with many distant relatives you never knew you had! A lot of the information on my website has been gathered in just this way. However, if you are not particularly knowledgeable about how to build a website, and also how to ensure that the website will be easily found among the millions of others on the internet by other people searching for related ancestors, it is advisable to deploy the services of a professional website designer who also knows how to make your site visible in search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Windows Live and Ask, and who has experience of how and where to place links to your website.

This is an area in which I specialise. Of course, I cannot guarantee results with search engines, especially if your ancestors have common names such as "John Smith", or names which are the same as famous people such as "George Bush", for which millions of other websites will be listed for these search terms above yours; however, I have considerable experience in dealing with these kinds of problems, and I can definitely help you to make your website visible on the internet. Click here for more details.

You may choose to store your genealogical data using a database programme. There are many such programmes available. However, it is wise to ensure that the programme allows you to export your database in GEDCOM format - a standard format for exchanging genealogical databases without having to re-key in the information. If you already have a database programme which can generate GEDCOM files, I can use this to build your website. However, if you are not comfortable using database programmes I can use your data as it is, in whatever format you have (e.g. as Microsoft Word documents).

Content copyright © 2006 Alasdair Broun, webmaster and site author, Skye Website Services. All rights reserved.
You are very welcome to quote short excerpts in appropriate contexts, without permission, if you refer to the source by providing links to the relevant pages on my site.
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