My Research Toolbox has now grown too large to fit on one page! I've divided it into separate pages for each category, with access via an index page. The screenshot above shows the page for the House History category, with links to a variety of research guides covering national and local archives.

The Toolbox contains links to websites I have found useful in my own research. It reflects my personal and professional research interests and doesn't pretend to be comprehensive. If you don't find what you're looking for there, please try Cyndi's List.

Happy researching!

This morning I spoke to the Thornbury U3A Family History Group on the subject "Descendants of Cutty Sark - Tracing Living People". They were a great audience, as ever, and asked some excellent questions about sources for tracing living people. I shared with them my personal research toolbox of links. It should keep them all busy researching for a while! Over the next few weeks I'll be sharing some of my favourite websites for tracing living people here on this blog.

I am thrilled to be resuming my career as a genealogy speaker, having had to give it up four years ago because my health was unreliable. I've been so much better this year that I am once again taking speaking engagements. 

My first talk will be to the U3A Family History Group at The Chantry, Thornbury, Gloucestershire at 10 am on 16 November 2012. My subject will be "Descendants of Cutty Sark - Tracing Living People". 

Yesterday I received a nice compliment about the design of my new Sodbury Genealogy website. I'd been feeling discontented with the old monochrome theme of this website and was also very conscious that the content needed updating. So I decided to do a makeover, using the same Weebly theme I've used for  Sodbury Genealogy but with a different image header. The image I've chosen is a postcard I own, showing Coupar Angus, Perthshire in Edwardian times. I blogged about the postcard last year in Postcard from the Past. My aim was to give the two sites the feeling of "coming from the same stable", whilst being visually distinct from each other.

I've added lots of new content to the site, the main addition being a page devoted to my research into the crews of Cutty Sark. I've also added a page explaining my terms of business, covering topics such as ethics, the research agreement, copyright, payment and being prepared for research to turn up unexpected results! This last item was included following a discussion on the APG mailing list which showed that several of us have had to break bad news to clients about their ancestors. Harold Henderson of Midwest Roots reminded us that we are advised to raise this general issue with clients before starting a research project, so I've added a section to this website.

I hope you like the new layout and content. Please comment on this post to let me know what you think.

On Monday I launched my new website Sodbury Genealogy, devoted to genealogy and family history in the market town of Chipping Sodbury and the surrounding parishes in South Gloucestershire. The intention is to provide records, maps, images, links and blogposts to help those researching families in the area. 

I've lived in Chipping Sodbury since 2004 and, as a professional genealogist, I have a special interest in the history and genealogy of this delightful market town. This new website is my way of giving something back to the town, its people and my fellow genealogists.

I'll be adding content gradually over the next few months, so please call back often to see what's new. The best way to keep up to date with developments is to follow the website on Facebook and Twitter, using the links which can be found at the top of every page.

I've been working on a project for a client involving research into a group of unrelated but historically connected people. Quite a few of these people appear in online family trees. 

AFTER I did my research on each person I checked out the online trees to see if I had missed anything. I was staggered by the very high degree of inaccuracy I found. I estimate over 90% of the trees had incorrect data for basic birth, marriage and death facts. Given that these people were unrelated, this was not just one "family historian" posting misinformation but many separate individuals. 

On the plus side, 1% of the online trees led to gold dust such as family photographs or digital images of primary source material.