Do you remember your first tentative family tree? Take some time to celebrate how far you have come and recognise where you are today. Intentionally create the future researcher you want to be.
Where to watch? All the talks will be freely available in our Learning Hub.
Supported by Society for One Place Studies, A Few Forgotten Women, British Association for Local History, Federation of Family History Societies and Projectkin.
Do you remember your first tentative family tree? Take some time to celebrate how far you have come and recognise where you are today. Intentionally create the future researcher you want to be.
The eighteenth century generated an ever-growing range of records that document the people living within a community. This presentation highlights a variety of name-rich sources—from land tax assessments and settlement records to militia lists, estate papers and parish material—that can be used to reconstruct the lives of individuals and families. Through brief case studies, it shows how exploring the records of a place can transform our understanding of the people who lived there.
New to tracing your Australian ancestors? This session covers the essential record types and resources every beginner needs to know, and where to find them. You will leave with a clear starting point and practical next steps, giving you the confidence to begin building your family history the right way.
You’ve finally found a placename connected to your Irish ancestor. But is it a parish, a village, a townland? And where exactly is it? Working through some examples, you’ll see how to identify and locate your place using maps and online tools.
This talk will introduce the Victoria County History (VCH) and provide practical support for using free online versions of its ‘Big Red Books’ on British History Online (BHO).
Private family and estate archives have grown out of a specific personal context but the evidence they contain can assist a much wider audience of genealogists and local historians. Documents from this archive will demonstrate how you can find out about your people and places in historic house archives.
Many people exploring their family of local history limit their research to sources they can easily find online. However, only a tiny fraction of all the preserved archival sources have been digitised, so researchers are missing out on finding a huge range of information. Finding archival sources can be tricky. Each archive service may work in a different way. Online catalogues, managed by under funded services, can be clunky to use. Collections may not be preserved in the most obvious places. This talk will provide 6 basic steps that will provide a framework for finding archival sources in England and Wales. It will highlight key sources of information and help you to pinpoint the right archive at the first attempt.
Every family has stories worth preserving, yet many histories remain untold. In this engaging and practical session, Wall Street Journal and Publishers Weekly bestselling author Sheena Yap Chan shares how to move beyond names and dates to uncover the voices, experiences, and places that shaped previous generations. Participants will learn practical strategies to interview relatives, document memories, connect family stories to local communities, and preserve meaningful legacies. Whether you’re just beginning or expanding your family history research, you’ll leave with actionable tools to bring your family’s story to life.
The medieval era has interesting and meaningful data. Knowing where to look and what to expect can turn medieval research into a rich area of research. Medieval research into villages may not have been carried out in much detail before, so there are prospects for brand new discoveries.
Parish registers hold much more than names and dates. They can reveal clues about family relationships, difficult times, and the communities our ancestors lived in – if you know what to look for. In this talk, you’ll discover how mind mapping can help you connect details found in baptism, marriage, and burial registers. By looking at these records in a new way, you’ll learn how to spot patterns, ask better questions, and turn ordinary parish register entries into fascinating stories about your ancestors’ lives.
As the local family history society, this is one of the questions we get asked the most. In this talk I will show where people who died in this Middlesex parish are most likely to have been buried.
This talk will show two ways to search for buried references to places. Search is possible in Full Text Search and in the FamilySearch Catalog with different opportunities and efficiencies. Two possible pitfalls, spelling and categories, will be highlighted to prepare you to conduct successful searches.
Some of the most compelling stories are found in the smallest places. This presentation explores how researching micro communities, such as tiny neighborhoods, churches, or even a single street, can uncover rich historical connections that larger geographic studies often miss. Learn why small-scale one-place studies are easier to manage, produce meaningful discoveries, and foster community collaboration. Whether you’re just getting started or looking to expand an existing project, you’ll leave with practical strategies for identifying, researching, and sharing the unique stories hidden in overlooked places.
When starting your family history, it can be tempting to simply look up the dates and places of your ancestors’ vital events, but this makes for a rather bare tree! This session explores how to go beyond names and dates to build richer, more meaningful ancestral stories. We’ll uncover the record collections that provide the clues and context needed to bring your ancestors to life, while also showing how they can help break down brick walls.
Tracing your European roots doesn’t require a plane ticket. This presentation shares ten practical tips for navigating online archives and libraries across Europe, from national record repositories to digitized parish registers and historical newspapers. Learn how to identify which countries and regions to search, overcome language barriers, understand record types unique to European genealogy, and locate free and subscription-based resources. Whether your ancestors came from Ukraine, Greece, Poland, or elsewhere on the continent, you’ll leave with a practical roadmap for starting—or advancing—your European ancestry research online.
Lost an ancestor or two? Join Simon Fowler as he suggests ten places where they may have got to and offers tips – based on personal experience -on how to find them. Some of course are obvious – always but always check your facts -but a few might well be new.
Some 35 years after I first visited the Pacific country of Fiji we will take a whistlestop tour of researching genealogy, history and understanding the impact of the former Empire
The FamilySearch Research Wiki links to more than 2.7 million family history resources. It contains details for all countries at several jurisdictional levels, often down to the parish level. This class will show how to navigate to relevant pages for the place you are researching and a seldom used trick to search for wiki content.
Kicking off this year’s All About That Place (AATP) series are two veteran genealogists, Jennifer Jones of Tracking Down the Family in Bendigo, Australia, and Kyla Bayang of RootSquad Roundup in Tomball, Texas. Jennifer and Kyla will share notes on how to get started with One-Place Studies. Jennifer cut her teeth with a study of Haverfordwest in Wales. She’s now actively working on a study of the goldfields at Whroo, Victoria. Kyla has turned her focus to the Ship Brooklyn project, an exploration of the Latter-day Saints who traveled on the Ship Brooklyn from New York to San Francisco around Cape Horn in 1846 as part of a migration to the Great Salt Lake in Utah.
