Donna Przecha examines what you can learn from civil registrations, census records, and parish records in England. Find out what you should know before heading to the Family History Library or to your ancestors' homeland.
In this article, "the Family History Library" refers to the central genealogy library of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), located in Salt Lake City. "Family History Centers" are LDS genealogy libraries located throughout the world through which researchers can borrow films and fiche from the Salt Lake facility.
If your genealogy research takes you to England, consider yourself fortunate. To begin with, you will not have a language problem — at least, not too much, even though it is said at times that we are divided by a common language! England has been a very stable country, not overrun by foreign armies, and many old records still exist. The political boundaries have been pretty much the same for centuries so the political divisions will mostly have the same names and boundaries. The only geographical change is that the counties were restructured in 1974 and the genealogy records are filed by old county boundaries, so you do need a pre-1974 map.
[ Next Page ] - Click Here