It may be wise to engage some professional assistance. This might be because you live a long way from the repository that could have the piece of information you need, or because you don’t have the necessary skills to undertake the work yourself. Understanding land transactions, reading old Germanic handwriting and knowing what the preamble in an English will says are a few examples of where employing an experienced professional may be a great move. While you may be reluctant to spend $200 getting someone to visit the record office on your behalf, their knowledge, experience and expert eye may be worth every cent if they can track down what you need and interpret it for you.

There are a number of professional research organisations worldwide whish offer research services. In Australia, the Australasian Association of Genealogists and Record Agents provides a membership list (www.aagra.asn.au), while in the UK, its equivalent is the Association of Genealogists and Researchers in Archives (www.agra.org.uk). The Association of Professional Genealogists (www.apgen.org) has a worldwide remit, although most of its members are in the US. At www.sag.org.au, you’ll find a list of people who have undertaken a Diploma in Family Historical Studies and who are now available for private commissions.

At the end of the day, having research problems and brick walls is what family history is all about. If it was easy to get back to medieval England or the Vikings, there would not be the thrill and excitement of finally solving that vexing research problem that has been keeping you awake every night for years. So don’t give up when you hit a brick wall. Go back to basics, review what you already know and see if there is a clue you’ve missed. Share your problem by advertising your research interests online and seeking out a local family history society that may have the expertise to advise you.

There may be a lot of chipping away at the base of the brick wall before it comes crumbling down for you, and your opportunities to leap over it in one single bound may be few and far between. However, the most important thing is to find a way over, around or through it – only then can you continue your journey and climb further up that family tree.

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Once you’ve exhausted all of the avenues open to you, it may be time to turn to people with specific expertise to tackle the brick wall.

The expertise may well be found within a local historical society or the local family history society. Frequently, these organisations have access to local sources that may not be available elsewhere and which could prove to be the answer to your research problem. For example, if you are having difficulty tracing your ancestor’s death, a regional society may well have access to local funeral director’s records or local council’s burial registers, both of which could record that elusive event. And, of course, many people involved in local societies know who to ask – the town’s identity with a world-class memory who may be able to remember your family when they lived in the area.

Overcoming the brick walls in your research can often be achieved by finding people with local or specialist knowledge to give you a helping hand. Again, Cora Num’s excellent gateway Web site (www.coraweb.com.au) has a comprehensive list of local family and historical societies you can check out. Many have excellent Web sites full of information to give you guidance. Another source would be the Australian Federation of Family History Organisations (www.affho.org) or, if your problem is in the UK, try the Federation of Family History Societies (www.ffhs.org.uk).

At the library of the Society of Australian Genealogists (www.sag.org.au), for example there are volunteers on duty during library hours who are able to provide assistance with using resources and helping with research problems. In many cases, these volunteers have had many years of experience and are the ‘go to’ people when you hit a brick wall, as many specialise in specific topics such as Irish research or the British in India.

Such societies have expertise that may not be confined to knowing a lot about the area in which they are based. Many local family history societies have regular meetings and seminars where you may pick up a clue from a guest speaker on topics as diverse as English Census records to NSW convict records. You often don’t have to be a member to attend these sessions – check out the latest Activities programme for the Society of Australian Genealogists on its site (www.sag.org.au) under Courses to see what it has coming up in the next few months. Remember, sometimes it is the social chat over a cup of tea that will solve a brick wall that has worried you for years! Researchers who have spent far longer than you trying to solve their own research problems are invariably willing to lend a sympathetic ear and make suggestions as to how you might be able to crack the code!

Parents come here from these terms:

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Another basic principle of family history is not to re-invent the wheel. You should not assume that you are the first person to have traced your family history. It may be that someone else currently researching the same family, or uncle Bert who did the family history in the 1960’s, solved the problem that has currently brought your research to a stop.

Contacting others who are researching your family history has become increasingly easy with the Net. There are a number of sites, both free and paid, where people can advertise their research interests to others. Two of the largest of these are Rootsweb’s World Connect (www.rootsweb.com) and Genes Reunited (www.genesreunited.com).

The World Connect project is a free service. It boasts almost 5 million surnames, provided by researchers from around the world. The useful feature of World Connect, apart from it being free, is that the contact email address of the person who contributed their research is provided once a successful search is completed.

Genes Reunited is a paid service. The current subscription is a modest $19.95 for one year’s access to its database. In this case, the contributor’s contact details are hidden. After you successfully find a common ancestor, the site prompts you to send an email to the contributor, but you don’t get to see their contact details until they are willing to provide them to you. Up to that point, you basically use the Genes Reunited as a postbox and it delivers the mail backwards and forwards between subscribers!
The great feature of both of these sites is that you are able to do searches in a number of different ways. The flexibility can help you overcome some problems you may have encountered in your research.

For example, one of the problems in tracing female ancestors is establishing a maiden surname. You may have found the baptism of your ancestor, Thomas hills, son of John and Mary in 1780 at Ryarsh in Kent, England, but Mary’s maiden name is not provided on the church baptismal register. Unless you are able to trace the marriage of John and Mary, Mary’s maiden name and further research on that line is fairly much at a dead end.

Using both World Connect and Genes Reunited, you are able to estimate birth years and do searches for people just by given name and area without having to specify other details such as surname. Fir example, we could do a search for all people with the given name Mary born in Ryarsh between the years we think she may have been born. This may well see you on the way to finding ‘your’ Mary, as other researchers may already know from different sources that ‘their’ Mary Bowden married Thomas Hills in Ryarsh.

Don’t forget, too, the power of Google. Many family historians around the world have their own Web sites where they’ve published details of their research. Just putting the name of one of your problematic ancestors into Google and hitting the search button, may help you find a distant cousin who has built a Web site that features ancestors you have in common. Simply type in your ancestor’s name in quotation marks (for example, “John Packman”) followed by the search term genealogy or family history and/or the name of the place that you know that person lived. So, your whole search string may look something like: “John Packman” genealogy. Such a search instantly produces a list of Web sites containing information on the family history of someone called John Packman.

Increasingly, these days, social networking sites are also being used by family historians to get in touch with others who have similar research interests. The most popular of these is Facebook (www.facebook.com). While you first have to register (for free) before being able to use the site, once you’ve done so, you are well on your way to discovering people with the same surname as the one you’re looking for. Increasingly, too, there are a number of Facebook pages dedicated to getting everyone with the same surname together as a group within the site. For example, there is a Stieger Facebook page where anyone with that surname (or an interest in it) can join and be hooked up with others of the same name or interests. There is also an increasing number of Facebook groups that concentrate on one specific town or region, and this can be another place to find others with common research interests.

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