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The majority of primary material will be housed in record offices, libraries and museums, scattered across Britain – or, if your ancestors came from overseas, all around the world. Many people loosely refer to these institutions as ‘archives’. Although this isn’t the place for academic debate, in technical terms an archive is actually a collection of documents, manuscripts or other primary evidence, although the term is more often used to describe the building or institution in which the collection is housed. It is in this context that the word ‘archive’ will be used in this book.

For those of you who have never been to an archive before, it can be a daunting experience, but one well worth undertaking. Each archive is unique, will hold a different variety of records, and will have its own way of collecting, storing, cataloguing and indexing its records. Bearing in mind that information about your ancestors could turn up anywhere, the first step of your research strategy should be to work out which archives are going to be of most use to you first. The following notes should help you do this, but don’t forget that you will probably need to visit more than one archive over the course of your research, and will often have to return to the same archive many times.