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Okay this is Celia Heritage
who is a professional genealogist and author
and teacher
and we would like to talk to you about death records.
Well Death Records are some of the most enlightening records
for your family history whereas records such as census returns and birth and
marriage records
they are going to give you the core of your family tree your pedigree
and you'll be able to work back by using those records, very often its
death records actually put the flesh on the bones your family trees.
This is going to be the records to actually show you what your ancestors
were like
and very often give you the sort of nitty-gritty to finding
more about them. For example obituaries are going to shed a lot of light
on your ancestors
personality and also things he was involved in
which very often aren't going to be mentioned in any other official records.
Many of our ancestors I'm afraid died rather tragic or sudden deaths
and in that case there will of course be an inquest and
this might have been an unfortunate for your ancestor that he died suddenly
but if there is an inquest record there for you the researcher
it's going to be fantastic because the amount of detail you're going to get
in that record
is going to outweigh anything you're going to get from standard records
such as births, marriages or census records.
Just to give you one example, when I was looking at inquest records in Kendal a
few years ago
I was looking at the case of just an ordinary labourer called Stephen Simpson
and he died a nasty death but the interesting thing is
the sort of detail I was getting from those inquest records were things like
he and his wife Jane had actually been separated for two years.
Now this was back in the 1880s and you wouldn't have found that information
in any other record at all. So death records are
really some of your most enlightening, sadly overlooked by many researchers
because we tend to get caught up with trying to get backwards, but really don't
neglect your records of death at that because they are probably the ones that are going to tell
you a lot more
about your ancestors when he was alive. That's brilliant! I believe you have a
Pen and Sword
book that's available at the moment. Yes that's called Tracing Your Ancestors Through Death Records
It is available here at the show for a discounted price and you can,
of course,
also get it online. So do go and have a look at that.
That's full of lots of case studies to illustrate what I'm talking about.
We're not just looking at inquests and obituaries we're looking at death
certificates,
a very underused source and burials and also other less frequently
used records
and of course wills as well. Okay, thank you very much
Thank You.