Читать книгу Who Do You Think You Are? Encyclopedia of Genealogy: The definitive reference guide to tracing your family history - Nick Barratt - Страница 118

Experienced genealogists have voiced their concerns over the past few years about the increasing reliance on Internet resources as opposed to traditional methods of research. Whilst this largely stemmed at first from a reluctance to adapt to new technology, they have raised some very valid points.

Millions of original documents, catalogues and indexes have been digitized so that they can be searched online quickly and from the comfort of your own home, but this has led to a misapprehension that it is now possible to research an entire family tree on the Internet. This is certainly not the case, and although most of the key ‘first step’ resources are now online, only a very small percentage of the entire range of original documents useful to genealogists is available from the Internet. You will be required to make many trips to various archives, but this is all part of the fun.

Before you can even begin taking advantage of the many records that are online, you will probably need to research your family tree offline for at least a few generations before the Internet records are of any real use. The majority of records online pertain to the nineteenth century, mainly because many more recent sources (such as the vast majority of twentieth-century censuses) are ‘closed’ – that is, they are not available to be made public – because they contain sensitive personal information about individuals who could be still alive. More datasets for the twentieth century are now becoming available, however, such as phonebooks and directories, though these alone will not be enough to trace back a branch – only place them in one location at a given time. Online records for earlier eras are also scant, mainly because there are no centralized indexes for resources like parish registers and wills proved in county courts, making the task of putting them all online a very large-scale and time-consuming one.

‘The majority of records online pertain to the nineteenth century.’