We have an extensive archive of articles about genealogical research. Here is a brief introduction to several of them.
Australian Ancestry Records
Australia immigration records are best researched online at several ancestry websites and locations. One of the best for later periods of immigration is the National Archives of Australia website. The Australian National Archives can be found at naa.gov.au, where you can find information on migration, citizenship and travel to Australia over the generations.
The files give information on people who migrated to the island and became Australians in the 19th and 20th century, as well as information about people who left Australia and later returned.
Included in these Australian immigration records on travelers to the island nation are the person’s nationality, date of brith, place of birth, profession, background education, family history or details of traveling family members and even a photograph, if you’re lucky.
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Australian Immigration Records
Australian immigration records are particularly well-kept, with information regarding a person’s name, birthdate, birthplace, occupation, marriage status, children and the number of children, and even a physical description of the person. For getting a picture of your family ancestry, the immigration archives of Australia far surpass the immigration information and are invaluable.
One reason for the solid ancestry information at the disposal of those searching Australian immigration records is because so many of the new immigrants to Australia in the early years of Aussie settlement were British convicts. Of the 1,000,000 or so people who immigrated to Australia and nearby islands from 1788 to 1900, over 160,000 were convicted of crimes back in Britain. If you want to keep a record of who the potential troublemakers are, you’re going to want a lot of information about them, especially a description.
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Canada Genealogical Records
Canada ancestry records research is one of the easiest and most efficient genealogical studies you’ll ever perform. That’s because Canada has known relative peace and calm throughout most of its history, and the Canadians have always had an efficient and conscientious bureaucracy to take solid real estate records and census records.
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Canadian Immigrant Records
Canadian immigration records are some of the best in the world, kept by the National Archives of Canada and available to the public online. The records are only reliable back to 1865, though, because that’s the year that the passenger lists for most Canadian ports were first formally archived.
That’s the year the port of Quebec, the most important city for receiving foreign immigrants, began the practice of keeping formal records of ship registries.
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England Genealogy Records
England ancestry records are easy to find, because the English have had nearly 1,000 years of unbroken civilization, free from conquest and foreign occupation. Though many Catholic ancestry records were lost in the changeover from Catholic to Protestant in the 16th century, most genealogy records remain from centuries back.
Many Americans and Canadians seeking their family history are lucky to have distant relatives who lived in what is now the United Kingdom of England and Wales.
Finding England’s ancestry records online is more a matter of choosing a website you can trust to give you good genealogical information, because there are so many different ancestry sites on the Internet. Most of the family bloodline information you can find for free, especially in certains eras of English history.
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Ireland Genealogical Records
Ireland ancestry records are generally full of information about the genealogy of your ancestors, so Irish-Americans looking to search through a family history that dates back to Ireland can probably expect to find reliable information. I’ve discussed this a couple of times on this site, but it bears repeating whenever the subject comes out. Certain churches, due to their copious genealogical or ceremonial records, greatly help when searching for information about your forebears.
The Irish public records, for instance, are greatly enhanced by the records of the Irish Catholic Church. Because many Catholic rituals are entered into the local church records, you can learn a lot about your ancestry by studying the Catholic records, if your ancestors were Roman Catholic.
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Ireland Immigration Records
Irish immigration records can take you on a search of genealogical files and ancestry resources worldwide, because people immigrated from Ireland to find better opportunities in many different parts of the world in the 18th, 19th and 20th century. You could have cousins in the United States, Canada, Australia or a number of other destinations.
Of course, if you’re an Irish-American searching for your Irish ancestors, you’ll probably only want to begin your research on your family tree in the U.S. and Ireland. There are several online ancestry resources that should let you search their files for free, so you should have a pretty solid picture of your Irish family ancestry before you ever purchase a subscription to a paid Internet ancestry website.
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Italian Genealogical Records
Italian ancestry records for Italian-Americans studying their genealogy are going to be found in a number of different research centers and sources. The Italian diaspora took place from the 1860s until the 1960s, mainly because Italy remained largely an agricultural society where poverty was rampant. This caused waves of Italian immigration, especially to the United States.
Immigration from Italy to the U.S. in the latter parts of the 19th century and the early 20th century came through Ellis Island. For this reason, Ellis Island archives will be helpful to many people searching for their Italian ancestry records. Public records back in Italy may be a little more confusing, though the online archives and public records of the Roman Catholic Church might help to mitigate the difficulties of the search.
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Mormon Genealogical Records
Mormon ancestry records are the best resources for studying your family’s genealogy in the world. Mormons have nearly 5,000 Family History Centers worldwide. Almost all of the information offered about ancestors is free, though you’ll occasionally have to pay a reasonable fee for access to their repositories of family histories.
Included in these research centers are microfilms and microfiches of birth records and other public records of the past, as well as genealogical books.
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UK Immigration Records
UK immigration records help English-speaking people searching their ancestry by presenting passenger ship name lists from the United Kingdom and immigration files in the regions the immigrants were traveling to.
Often, British officials were happy to see immigrants leave the British Isles or were even forcing these people and families to leave, so they kept legal archives of ship registries for convict ships, assisted immigrants, bounty immigrants and other so-called undesireables.
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