Don't always assume with database sites!

Whilst working on the second edition of my Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet book today (cooking along nicely!), I came across a timely reminder that what you think a genealogy website may have to offer you by way of resources has every means to surprise you, by throwing up something completely new.

Eddie's Extracts (www.eddiesextracts.com) is Eddie Connelly's go to website for many Northern Irish resources, most notably intimations extracts from many newspapers in the north of Ireland. But there are a few surprises in there also. For example, in Eddie's Mariner Extracts section, you will find entries from the Register of Deceased Seamen from 1911 to 1924/25 for the Scottish islands of Orkney and Shetland. In his Roll of Honour section, where the Presbyterian Church in Ireland Rolls of Honour for the two world wars are located, as well as many rolls for Northern Irish based congregations, you will also find the The Register of the War Dead (Dublin City and County), the Kilkenny Great War Memorial, and Roll of Honour for St. Nicholas Collegiate Church, Galway, amongst other southern Irish based collections.

You'll find the same thing on other sites. On ScotlandsPeople (www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk), for example, the Scottish Roman Catholic records collections also include material from the Aldershot based Bishopric of the Forces, for events featuring Roman Catholics from British bases worldwide - no Scottish connection required!

And on the English and Welsh General Register Office site (https://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/certificates/default.asp), you're not only able to order up records of English and Welsh birth, marriage and death records from 1837 onwards, but also many British overseas records, including various Army registers dating back to the 1760s. The records are separately indexed on Findmypast, FamilyRelatives (free) and TheGenealogist, but for a detailed overview of them, the best place to go is to a cached version of an article on FindmyPast's old help site, the 'Knowledge Base', located at http://tinyurl.com/overseasbmds, preserved by the Internet Archive a few years ago.

The moral of the story? Fully EXPLORE the sites you are using!

You'll never know quite what you might find if you don't... :)

Chris

For my genealogy guide books, visit http://britishgenes.blogspot.co.uk/p/my-books.html, whilst details of my research service are at www.ScotlandsGreatestStory.co.uk. Further content is also published daily on The GENES Blog Facebook page at www.facebook.com/BritishGENES.