Mark Carroll was for over 30 years a biochemistry lecturer at one of London's premier medical schools. He was introduced to family history by his sister in 2002. His first major project was to research his mother's maiden name, Orriss. Little did he know that it would not be so easy, despite the apparently rare surname. He also did not realise that he would come up against the genealogist's worst nightmare: a Smith family from London! In spite of these challenges he made substantial progress. Along the way he was helped by archivists and by some distant cousins who had been researching the shared family for years. With their combined sleuthing, he and they together took the Orriss line back to a marriage in Suffolk in 1597. But what to do when you hit a genealogical 'brick wall'? In recent years DNA analysis has opened up new possibilities for family historians. With his professional background in human biochemical genetics, Mark was well placed to take advantage of this novel technology. In this fascinating and at times amusing book Mark takes you on a journey to discover the origins of his mother's family. He describes, in an engaging and non-technical way, his successes and failures, the research methods he employed, the skills he developed, and his use of DNA analysis. He has yet to overcome his greatest genealogical challenge - to prove whether his mother's Orriss family is descended from King Alfred the Great!

Keeping Chronicles is the latest book by Rosemary Sassoon. It intends to show the many ways handwritten and other documents from family archives and other sources are so valuable, not only to the family concerned, but to local as well as national museums. The many examples within the book illustrate different categories such as letters, diaries, travel records, business and legal ones, personal scrapbooks, school books and cookery books etc. Also included is practical advice from professionals in the field about how to preserve such items and present them for safekeeping to museums. Rosemary discusses her own memorabilia collection and shows how she has preserved these historical items. After giving talks on the matter of preserving written items, Rosemary was saddened to hear that so many people discarded such memorabilia, destroying family history in a minute, because they were unsure of how to preserve these items to keep. This book will inspire readers to start their own memorabilia collection.

The German bestseller - a powerful and deeply affecting graphic memoir that explores identity, guilt and the meaning of home *WINNER of the The National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography* One of the Guardian's '50 Biggest Books of Autumn 2018' The New York Times Critics' Top Books of 2018 Nora Krug grew up as a second-generation German after the end of the Second World War, struggling with a profound ambivalence towards her country's recent past. Travelling as a teenager, her accent alone evoked raw emotions in the people she met, an anger she understood, and shared. Seventeen years after leaving Germany for the US, Nora Krug decided she couldn't know who she was without confronting where she'd come from. In Heimat, she documents her journey investigating the lives of her family members under the Nazi regime, visually charting her way back to a country still tainted by war. Beautifully illustrated and lyrically told, Heimat is a powerful meditation on the search for cultural identity, and the meaning of history and home.