Find your colonial ancestors in the communities of New England with these fifteen strategies that cut through 400 years of changing records. Learn expert practices for accessing New England’s information and building evidence of lives long forgotten. Your early New England roots can come to life with these less-obvious sources and methods.

Understand original steps in getting from event – birth, marriage or death to an index; how online services impact searches; how to obtain inexpensive certificates. Access procedures and costs for obtaining birth, marriage and death certificates in England and Wales has changed radically in the last few years. Positively, the reduced costs make it such there is no excuse for not getting all birth and death certificates. Negatively, people are losing sight of what they are actually searching to get the certificate. – Learn the original process of getting from an event to a listing within an index (local or national). – Learn what rules and laws changed the above processes over time. – Understand differences between original and new indexes. – See the impact of which versions of the indexes are being searched by the different online services. – Learn how to purchase, and quickly obtain birth and death certificates. – See the different versions of the certificates that can be currently purchased. – Learn alternatives for obtaining cheaper marriage records.

This lecture details the resources available for researching your New England ancestors who arrived during the Great Migration from England from 1620-1640. Discussion of the scholarship and resources both published and online created by the Great Migration Study Project will be covered.

What are the secrets to finding New England vital records today? If you understand how they were made, and all the things that have happened to them since, you will bring new skills and insight to your vital records research. Also, let’s develop some strategies for those times when the record cannot be found.

Do you know the difference between a Peculiar Baptist and an Anabaptist? What types of records the Quakers kept? What the Puritans believed? Understanding the background to and the beliefs of the multitude of non-conformist churches can give us an insight into our ancestors’ lives. Learning what records the various groups kept can give us a new lead for our research, or prevent us looking for records that never existed in the first place. This talk will not only tackle those questions, but also give a history of many of the non-conformist churches that existed in England and Wales.

Discover the building blocks for researching in the English counties. This talk provides an overview of the key facts you need to know to start researching your English ancestors. Unravel why counties have come and gone with changing boundaries and different types of administrative entities. By understanding which records are stored at national or county level and some of the laws that influenced their collation, you will then be able to effectively concentrate on looking at the specific counties your ancestors came from. Learn about the finding aids and helpful resources to ensure you are set up to take a journey through English research supported by our English Research Series.

New England town records represent a unique resource for Family historians. Early settlers from England brought their traditions of town governance to the new world, including their ideas of legal matters and record keeping. The result is a treasure trove of documents that capture aspects of our ancestors’ lives as they went about their day-to-day business. These records are especially valuable for the 17th and 18th centuries as many other records may not have survived. This webinar covers not only vital record sources but also records from the Town Treasurer, Overseers of the Poor, and the Selectmen.

Just as some New Englanders left their declining farms and headed west, industrialization arrived in New England and our ancestors’ lives and records changed forever. The days when deeds and probate would solve genealogical problems gave way to a dizzying array of new census collections, state mandated vital records, poorhouse, prison and asylum records, sturdier cemetery markers, and military pensions. Let’s re-teach ourselves as we trace 1800’s ancestors.

Researching ancestors who lived in colonial New England can be challenging. This webinar begins by tracing settlement patterns, setting the stage for understanding key records and where to find them. For the 17th century, many unique published resources exist to help the family researcher. During the colonial years, several conflicts such as King Philip’s War and the Seven Years War affected settlement and thus the surviving records. The 18th century culminated in the Revolutionary War, but also saw the continued growth of settlement and ultimately resources for the family historian.

Learn how to effectively use the research tools, indexes and catalogs on this large website to find your ancestors and to put them into their correct historical context.

It can be quite daunting to find your ancestors who lived in the Greater London area as records are held at numerous archives. Parishes number in the hundreds and surprisingly, many Londoners in the 18th and 19th centuries were quite mobile. This presentation will take you through a variety of…

There are two mass movements called “Great Migrations” that affected the settlement that part of America known now as the United States. The earlier “Great Migration” refers to immigrants who came to America during the years from 1620 to 1633. The individual immigrants who arrived in America during this migration have been extensively documented by genealogist Robert Anderson working with The Great Migration Project. This webinar will explain this first Great Migration and highlight the work done by The Great Migration Project