Click on a Topic to view... Directories • Church Registers • Marriage Licenses • History & Topography • Wills • Pedigrees • Emigration • Lifestyle • War Records • Maps • Genealogy "how to" books • Gleanings

When people start researching their family history, it is natural to first try to establish a "family tree", which contains the bare details of dates and places of birth or baptism, marriage and death. But really, that is not a family history as such, it is just a collection of names and dates.
Family history is much more than a set of names and dates. These were real people, who lived real lives, and were influenced by things and events around them, just as we are today. With a little more effort we can find much more about our ancestors and how they lived.

Directories

This is where we can start to add some serious meat to the bare bones of names and dates in our family history. British county directories began in earnest around the 1820s (although there were some at the end of the 1700s) with the publications of Pigot & Co.
A county directory in those early editions, listed people with trades (anyone with a trade, not just businesses though), and important people in each parish, together with short descriptions of each place and its facilities and history. There followed, from about 1830, some more comprehensive directories by other companies, one notable one being White's of Sheffield. These were much thicker books, extending to 600 pages or more, and contained much more detail. They also included some excellent history information, some of them in great detail. These books are very sought after, and can now be very expensive to purchase - assuming that you can even find them!
Here in Canada the introduction of directories came a little later and tended to be limited to the larger urban areas. The Lovell publishing Company of Montreal is known to have produced directories for that city during the early 1900s, which very much mirror the content of the British ones. They also published a number of other trade and professional directories. Archive CD Books Canada is interested in publishing directories on CD, and we are always on the lookout for them.

Church Registers

Over the years there has been a concerted effort to transcribe and index parish registers. This work began in the late 1800s when a plethora of small limited edition books were published. These are now extremely rare, although they do occasionally come onto the private market through book dealers. In more recent years there have been more indexes and transcriptions made by family history societies.
The Archive CD Books Project is interested in publishing such transcriptions on CD as well as original church registers:

• Original Church Registers
• Books of transcriptions of registers published in the late 1800s and early 1900s
• Transcriptions made in more recent times - either by individuals or family history societies.

(If you would like to discuss your own publications on CD then please contact us )

There is still no substitute for the original registers when it comes to accuracy of information. They are the primary records. But good transcripts, which are secondary sources, are usually very good indeed, and much easier to use by far.

Marriage Licenses

The normal way of marrying was (still is) by the reading of Banns in church for three consecutive weeks before the marriage. However, an alternative way is to obtain a license to marry immediately, and many people did. Those licenses are preserved, and in many cases have been transcribed and published in books, usually around 1890-1920.
Those books are invaluable sources of information, especially as they give us some excellent family history clues, including the home parishes of the couple, ages, occupations, marital status (widow, etc.) and very often a father's name - some things that are not on pre 1837 marriage records. In addition, there was often a "bond" - an agreement to be married - and the bondsman (usually a relative) is also shown.
A license may be issued in a different county from that of the couple, and this is very often the case. For example licenses issued in the Diocese of London will include couples from all over Great Britain.

History & Topography Books

What some people consider to be "dry" books. But how wrong they are!
The history books, especially those for a county, are full of really useful information about places at the time our ancestors lived, and give a tremendous insight into what was happening at the time.
Topography books - descriptions of a county or a place - similarly give so much useful information. Everything from the way that the geology influences the soil types and hence the agriculture, to natural resources that influenced early industries. The lie of the land, descriptions of the sites and situations of places, and of the settlements. These books also sometimes hide under the forbidding name of “lectures.” From the mid to late 1800’s travel became reliable enough for some of the more adventurous gentlemen of the time to embark on explorations and, on their return, they recited their adventures to an eager public as illustrated lectures. One such is John Stoddard who, in addition to pioneering travel photography, published his lectures in a wonderful series of illustrated volumes.
Some people are satisfied by just collecting names and dates - a family tree- but without adding any meat to the bare bones of their research. History and topography books do that.

Wills

Everybody knows of them. Few people use them in their research.
They are probably the most under used, and yet most useful source of family history information.
They tell us so much! A will normally gives us a whole family, and tells us about what the person owned. Everything from houses and land to spoons and bedding.
We can get access to the actual wills, but first we need to locate them. That's where books come in useful. There are two types of books on wills:
Calendars of Wills Names, with dates and places. Arranged yearly for a court where they were proved. Not a lot of detail, but invaluable for tracing if a will exists and where to find it.
Abstracts of Wills A transcript of the main points from wills. All of the beneficiaries and their relationships. Wonderful stuff, as it saves you having to extract the information from old awkward to read hand-written documents. Abstracts are usually published for one court for one year's worth of wills. It doesn't matter if your ancestor didn't die in that particular year - it is the information that they contain about the living people that is important!
Either way, use them to locate copies of the actual originals, and write off to order them. Copies are cheap!
Whole family trees can be built up from the information contained in wills!

Pedigrees

These fall into three main types:
Genealogy research pedigrees Where someone has researched the family tree of a surname and has published it. There were lots of them done in the late 1800s. Good stuff, although be a little wary of accepting them without proving it for yourself with reference to actual records, as some of the Victorian pedigree researchers were sometimes a little over zealous in "proving" links to important people.
Peerages The well-known ones are the Burke's Peerages, although there were many others.
Visitations Usually carried out in the 1500s and 1600s - essentially to prove the right to coats of arms. Excellent, and often extremely useful, in that they go way back into ancestors in Norman times in the 1100s and 1200s.

Emigration

During the 1800s and early 1900s there were lots of books written about emigration from the British Isles to various locations in the world. They are invaluable sources of background information for family history researchers, especially those of us now living in North America as in most cases they contain an immense amount of information about: shipping, costs, conditions, employment, descriptions, lifestyle and facilities of the places concerned.

Lifestyle

We are finding more and more books that are of a general nature, such as first hand descriptions of country life, employment and industries in towns, etc. in the 1800s.
These provide an invaluable source of excellent background information for historians and genealogists. The real meat to how our ancestors lived at the time.
As the skills of reading and writing became more common, so the craftsmen of the ages began to commit their ideas and knowledge to paper and so a few precious books can still be found which give us a glimpse of some of the trade secrets and tricks of yesterdays master craftsmen. In addition to the records of their craft, many of the more enterprising attempted to find more customers by publishing catalogues of their products, leaving us with invaluable insights into the designs of those long past years.
We at Archive CD Books Canada are anxious to find and help to preserve this old time craftsmanship by reproducing as many of these early craftsman’s pattern books, early “how to” manuals and illustrated catalogues, as possible

War Records

There are many books relating to wars. Some of these contain more detail than others.
For service personnel in the early 1800s and 1700s it is always well worth looking at Almanacs, (even the Irish Almanacs have records of British Army and Navy personnel) especially if you are looking for people with ranks. We have quite a few of those already in the collection.
We also have a few volumes of the National Roll of the Great War , a series of books published in 1921 which list not only servicemen and details of their records, but also civilians who gave their services, such as nurses, etc.
We are also fortunate in having found two excellent books about the Boer war as seen from a Canadian perspective. After all it was a war in which many Canadians served. We will be publishing them as soon as we can.

Maps

Maps are one of the most valuable tools for historians and genealogists. Some of the CDs that we produce are of maps only, or are gazetteers and atlases that contain maps.
One of the most fascinating aspects of family history is to look at the spheres of influence of market towns and which villages in the surrounding areas they served. Those things had an influence on the ways that our ancestors behaved, just as they do today in fact.
Sometimes we are fortunate to find street maps of towns, and some of those in the collection of CD books date back as early as the 1600s.right through to street maps of towns of the 20th century. These are a "must" to include in your family history file.

Genealogy "how to" books

The subject of how to go about genealogy research is not a modern phenomenon. The Victorians were particularly intrigued by family history much as we are today. Some of the authors were undoubted experts on the subject, and, the methods, records and sources that they describe are just as applicable today as they were in the 1800s. They include a great number of resources described in great detail, many of which we tend to ignore today. Perhaps we just didn't know that they existed?
Books such as these widen your scope for research very considerably indeed!

Gleanings

(Things, especially facts, which are gathered or collected from various sources rather than acquired as a whole - Oxford American Dictionary.)
We frequently find valuable genealogical and historical information, published either as a booklet or as part of another larger document, which does not warrant reproduction as a regular “book on CD.” In order to make this valuable information available to you we are providing you with an additional unique line of products which we are calling “Gleanings”
The topics covered in these Gleanings are as broad as the whole of the rest of our catalogue but here are a few examples:
We have noticed that the proceedings and transactions of many history societies consist of collections of (relatively) short papers on a wide variety of unrelated subjects. It is frequently difficult to find this valuable information because it is "hidden" within the proceedings and so "disguised' by a rather uninteresting - or at best uninformative - title.
Then there are books which contain mostly very specialized information, not worth reproducing as a whole, but which also contain sections of great general historical, or genealogical, interest. An example of this would be a book containing a detailed history of a well known financial institution which also contained an appendix consisting of the Great War (WW1) Honor Roll for this institution, including many biographies. A very valuable, but unrecognized, genealogical resource.
Finally there are a wealth of little booklets which have been published from time to time to commemorate some local event or as a private or even a commercial publication. Many of these never made their way into libraries or archives and so are a vanishing resource.
We have priced these Gleanings with consideration of their small size but this means that we cannot economically put them onto a CD, so we are offering them to you as direct downloads only. You can purchase any of the Gleanings through our web cart just like any CD product but in this case we will contact you by e-mail to get the product to you.
We have listed our Gleanings products in their own sub catalogues so they don't get confused with our larger, full length, digital products.