Digging Deeper: Mastering Online Genealogy Research (480)

This course was previously called "Researching Online for Advanced Genealogists" but has been renamed to make it more clear that it is suitable for students working at an intermediate and advanced level.

The internet is now an essential research environment for family history: many indexes to genealogical records are now available only online, and the internet provides access to a wealth of information and contacts for family historians. This course examines the main types of internet resource which are useful in carrying out research in English and Welsh family history and aims to improve your search skills so that you can be more confident with your search results.

You will discover the different types of internet resource useful for family history and appreciate their distinctive functions, their benefits and limitations. You will be introduced to a range of techniques for locating information both within genealogy sites and across the web. You will learn why it is so important to understand the differences between online indexes and the original records. Finally you will get to know the main resources for publishing and sharing pedigrees and your family history with others.

Set book:
There is a set book which accompanies this course: Peter Christian, The Genealogists' Internet, (5th ed., 2012) and students are required to obtain a copy (see below).

UPDATE: It is accepted that this text is now over ten years old and some of the sites referenced have changed or disappeared, however the advice about the types of information to look for remains valid. This book has recently been made free to download under a Creative Commons licence (CC BY-SA 4.0). This is not a new edition but for this version all the links have been newly checked, and several hundred broken links have been updated to the current location of the material. The remaining broken links are marked as such but will still give readers an idea of the sort of material it is worth looking for online. The book can be read on the Internet Archive or downloaded in various formats from: https://archive.org/details/the-genealogists-internet. There is also a web version on the author's web site.