Tuesday, May 13, 2008

New LDS Research Guides for England and Scotland

I read on Miriam Midkiff's Ancestories1 blog and on the DearMYRTLE blog that there are new LDS Resource Guides for England and Scotland. I didn't get the LDS press release notice last week, so I went looking for them on the LDS web site, http://www.familysearch.org/.

The new England Resource Guide (for records between 1837 and 1901) can be found at Finding Records of Your Ancestors, England, 1837 to 1901. This is a 32 page PDF document.

The description says:

"If your ancestor lived in England between 1837 and 1901, the following steps will help you find the records of his or her family. These instructions will show
you which records to search, what to look for, and what tools to use. One piece of information will lead to another until you have identified each family member and filled out a family group record."


The new Scotland Resource Guide (for records between 1837 and 1901) can be found at Finding Records of Your Ancestors, Scotland, 1855 to 1901. This is a 26 page PDF document. The description is similar to the English description.

The copyright notices on these documents say 1998, 2008, so they have been updated recently.

There are many more documents like this on the LDS Resource Guides site here, including Resource Guides for African American, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Jewish, Mexico, Norway and Sweden.

Note that these documents are somewhat different from the Research Outlines found here. The Research Outlines cover a specific locality (all states, many countries, some record types) and all records for all times. Unfortunately, not all of the Research Outlines are in PDF format.

There are also Reference documents here that cover historical backgrounds of specific states and countries, all in PDF format.

There are Step-by-Step Guides for specific topics - most of them dealing with state vital records indexes and collections, and federal census records, here in PDF format.

Many of these documents are available in paper form and can be purchased for a reasonable cost at an LDS Family History Center.

"How-to" documents like this can be invaluable for genealogy researchers who are just starting their research, or for those who are not familiar with records in specific locations. I have downloaded many of the PDF files to my hard drive and have transferred them to the hard drive on my laptop for easy reference at a genealogy repository or society meeting.

If you have not read these LDS guides and documents, you should! They may help you understand the records that are available and where you might find them.

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