This title offers accessible and clear advice on discovering your family's history in the UK, explaining the best research techniques, how to log and collate your research. It contains all the information needed to start your own search including a useful checklist to guide through each stage. You can experience the amazing thrill of tracing back your bloodline hundreds of years and discovering who your ancestors were and what their lives were like. It contains over 135 illustrations, including diagrams, contemporaneous photographs, document facsimiles, sample family trees and artworks. It includes sections on Welsh, Scottish, Irish and Channel Island records, as well as English. This book introduces the subject of genealogy in a highly practical form, and explains the process of tracing and finding ancestors in the British Isles in a simple and easy-to-follow way. The book begins with the very basics of starting to research, guiding the reader through each stage, from finding clues in photographs and naming patterns, to creating drop-line charts and starting to draw up a family tree. The next section goes back to the early 1800s, and explains how to take investigations further by using all kinds of sources, both in archive form and on the internet, especially census information. The book also goes on to explain how to find relatives through their professions, apprenticeships, education, and military records. This useful guide to genealogy will help you discover your roots, identify your British ancestors, and unlock the secrets of your family heritage.

"I never missed my childhood home / until the tide stopped rolling in and / ochre sand no longer crunched between my toes ..." A little girl grows up to the sounds of the seaside in bustling Cleethorpes. There are family outings through the Lincolnshire Wolds in a tiny Austin 7, and ferry rides across the Humber. Family runs like a comforting thread throughout this 'little gem of a book', and lifelong friendships are forged in unexpected places ... A gentle and heartfelt memoir about the timeless call of the sea

What does a writer do when he's got a family that includes a blacklisted member of the Hollywood Ten, the brains behind Tony the Tiger and the Marlboro Man, a trio of gay puppeteers, the world's leading birdwatcher, sixties hippies, a Dutch stowaway who served in an all-black regiment during the American Civil War, a mother of unusual compassion and understanding, and a convicted murderer? He tells their stories and secrets, illuminating 150 years of American life along the way. Dan Bessie begins the journey through his family history with his great-grandfather in the cargo hold of a ship bound for New York on the storm-tossed Atlantic. What follows are stories of his grandfather's various entrepreneurial schemes (including a folding butter box business), a grandmother who was voted "New York's Prettiest Shop Girl" (and who resisted the recruitment efforts of various city madams), and his uncle Harry's Turnabout Theater in Los Angeles (a renowned puppet theater drawing patrons as diverse as Shirley Temple, Ray Bradbury, and Albert Einstein). Through inherited journals and literary effects, Bessie comes to a new understanding of his father, Alvah. An actor and writer, he fought in the Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. When he returned to the States, he headed to the Warner back lots to begin a screenwriting career. But as congress began investigating radicals in the film industry, Alvah was blacklisted for his Communist sympathies and was soon sent to jail as one of the Hollywood Ten. His grandmother's cousin, Sidney Lenz, wrote Lenz on Bridge, a classic guide to the game of contract bridge. Bessie describes what was billed as the Bridge Battle of the Century, a 1931 match between Lenz and an upstart opponent that was covered by journalists from all over the world. Bessie's brother-in-law Wes Wilson designed rock and roll posters for the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco during the 1960s, living a counterculture existence vastly different from the bridge-mad Depression Era. Cousin Michael was heir to the compulsive storytelling characterizing many of the Bessies. He found his niche in publishing, co-founding the Atheneum Press and shaping books by people such as Anwar Sadat, Edward Albee, and Aldous Huxley. With an equally impressive career, Uncle Leo built the country's fifth largest advertising agency. A passion of a different sort led cousin Phoebe Snetsinger to travel from Webster Groves, Missouri, to the far corners of Africa and Asia. The world's leading birder, she sighted 8,400 different birds-nearly 85 percent of the species known to exist. An extraordinary strain of creativity runs through the Bessie and Burnett clans, and Rare Birds celebrates the colorful diversity of a remarkable and accomplished family. While their choices and professions run the gamut of the American experience in the twentieth century, the history of the nation can be traced in these people's lives. Bessie's passionate birds of a feather gather to sing their unique song across decades and generations. Dan Bessie has been a film writer, director, producer, and animator since apprenticing on Tom and Jerry cartoons at MGM in 1956.

Heraldry's unfamiliar terminology discourages people from learning more about this fascinating subject but heraldic language is essential for the precise description of a coat of arms. This book provides a gentle introduction explaining terms and providing basic principles.

A History of Their Making captures 1000 years of Scottish events and history through the lens of Clan Comyn, for 200 years Scotland's most formidable clan and their descendants the Cummings of Altyre. Providing both a sweeping and closely detailed record of people, events and ambition from the early 1100s to the present day, and at the centre of which are the fortunes of the family at Altyre, clan chiefs since the mid-14th century. Providing a starting point and a template for those interested in the Cummings and their forebears and in researching the history of their own family.

First full edition of a crucial source for knowledge of the period. The eyre roll is a major source of information about medieval life, ranging from local courts and land tenure through town customs and the status of women to general neighbourliness. This is especially important for Northumberland, where constant border raiding was detrimental to the accumulation of local records. The survival of the Northumberland Eyre Roll for 1293, recording over eleven hundred law suits, provides a rare glimpse of the county (togetherwith information on Lancashire, Westmorland and Cumberland) on the eve of the outbreak of the Anglo-Scottish wars; as only brief extracts from the roll have been published previously, this full edition will be warmly welcomed. Thetext is accompanied by notes and a subject index providing a full guide to topics of special interest. CONSTANCE FRASER is a retired lecturer.

Genealogist Keith Gregson takes the reader on a whistle-stop tour of quirky family stories and strange ancestors rooted out by amateur and professional family historians. Each lively entry tells the story behind each discovery and then offers a brief insight into how the researcher found and then followed up their leads, revealing a range of chance encounters and the detective qualities required of a family historian. For example, one researcher discovered that his great-great-grandfather, as a child, was carried across the main street of West Hartlepool on the back of the famous tightrope walker Blondin. The Victorian newspaper report said that the rope had been tied between two chimney pots. Research into the author's own family revealed that one of his nineteenth-century ancestors lost his leg in a Midlands coal-mining accident, and that the amputated leg was buried in the local cemetery - to be joined by the rest of him on his final demise. A Viking in the Family is full of similar unexpected discoveries in the branches of family trees.