Compiled Sources & Where to Find Them: Difference between revisions

Thoroughly scour all home sources (including family history papers, copies of records, pictures, old letters (i.e. with an old address), family Bibles, journals/dairies, copies of vital record certificates and church records, memorabilia, interviews with extended family and close relatives’--and ensure the searching their home premises for family records, as well as interviewing old neighbors--all of which may prove very helpful! If we do not seek these and scan all to ascertain important details about our immigrant ancestors, we cannot honestly say that our (preliminary) search is completed.

The preliminary search continues by requiring you to initiate the next vital step—the standard procedure—of seeking for and searching compiled sources. Such compiled sources to search for includes published or manuscript sources on families found in libraries and archives; pedigrees, biographies, autobiographies, town and local histories, and online family genealogies. To some, this is the ‘ugly duckling’ aspect of the research process but nevertheless, a vital phase of doing standard (proper) due diligence. Like in the field of science, a post-graduate who seeks an advanced degree, or the research scientist seeking a government-sponsored grant to fund a campaign of forensic or frontier research in a chosen field of study, the proper preliminary search-protocol requires diligent and broad-spectrum searches for, and in, compiled sources to determine what’s already researched and thus far discovered in the chosen area of scientific study. Every researcher—family history 'beginner' or scientist—must do the same, diligently!