Genealogy - What’s in a name?
Interested in tracing your family’s Welsh roots? Ever wondered what the ancestral home looked like or delve into the real reason why Aunt Nel stopped speaking to Uncle Bob 40 years ago? Curious as to what drove your ancesters to leave home and migrate thousands of miles to a new life? Well, the web can help you uncover those carefully hidden skeletons.
The BBC has an interesting website with some good links and information about pursuing that quest.
Not sure where to look? Check out this page (also brought to us by BBC Wales) for a list (and links to) good places to search for records.
They’ve also provided some hints and tips for getting the whole process started. You can check those out here.
Like any research project, it pays to give, at least, a cursory look to all the bibliography-type information on these sites as you never know when you’ll find a small piece they may be missing from your own records or that may, perhaps, lead to such a tidbit. So don’t pass up all the goodies listed in sidebars on these pages.
I’ve joked about it a bit at the beginning, but I think that this is one area where the web has truly brought people together who would never otherwise have found each other. In researching my own family, I’ve met relatives scattered as far away as Australia and as close as a few miles. And those people have done some tracing themselves and many times came up with things I hadn’t known. Even, as was the case of one family member, photos of the original family home back in the old country!
At any rate, if you are interested in this type of research, I’ve listed a few other resource websites below.
Welsh GenWeb Project
(http://www.walesgenweb.com/)
Wales GENUKI Website
(http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/wal/)
[Photo inset: Mill at St. Fagan’s]