Читать книгу Who Do You Think You Are? Encyclopedia of Genealogy: The definitive reference guide to tracing your family history - Nick Barratt - Страница 87

When looking at the material you have selected, it is very tempting to jump straight in to identify references to your family hidden within the pages. Understandable though this is, given all the procedures you’ve had to go through to get to this stage, it would be a mistake to launch straight in without first checking what you are looking at, and why. Before you can usefully extract information from a document, you will need to understand why that document was created in the first place, how it would have been used, and what message it contained at the time it was written. If you do not do this, then you may be taking the information it contains out of its historical context and therefore run the risk of misinterpreting it. After all, documents were not initially created for the purpose of helping family detectives locate their ancestors in the twenty-first century. The records might not easily lend themselves to modern research techniques – for example, indexes may not survive, or you may need to identify the property where people lived rather than the person themselves. For example, electoral lists are a great way of tracing people’s movements, particularly in the twentieth century; however, they are rarely indexed by surname and so you need to work out their place of residence, for example from a certificate of birth, marriage or death.

Ask yourself why the document was created, and what information it was originally intended to provide. This will allow you to read it in its own context, and thereby understand why it is arranged the way it is. It may therefore be necessary to corroborate the source with one or more others before you can extract useful information from it. Most archives provide information leaflets about documents and why they were created, so set aside some time to read these useful articles so that you fully understand why you need to look at the documents. That way, you will come away with new names to add to your family tree, and a greater understanding of what they did to end up in an historical document.

‘Ask yourself why the document was created, and what information it was originally intended to provide.’

A good example is the search for a relevant death duty register (described in Chapter 8). Initially, they were created to provide information about the estate of a deceased person so that tax could be levied; but family historians now use them to track down the place where the will was registered, or to obtain further information about some of the beneficiaries in the will. At first glance, the notation used in the death duty register can be confusing or hard to read. Closer inspection, coupled with information contained in the accompanying research guide provided by The National Archives (where the records are stored) makes it easier to decipher the content of the document and allows you to extract the necessary data from the various sections of the register. This can then be used to find the will, and work out where some of the beneficiaries named in the will were living.