For those interested in British research, a FREE eBook titled “At Home With Your Ancestors” is now 
available at the howto.co.uk website. The book is written by Diane Marelli, and details online genealogy research from a British point-of-view. Although the book seems to be dated about April of 2006, most of the the text found therein is timeless, very well written, and will be of interest to anyone doing British genealogy.
Chapter titles are as follows:
- Introduction
- The Internet, Birth and Marriages
- The Next Generation and the 1901 Census
- Births, Marriages and the Census
- Death Certificates and the Census
- Beyond 1837 and the Census
- Search Tips
- Behind the Names and Dates
- Recording & Storing Family History
- Follow-up to Live Exercise: Researching With Limited Information
How To is a free information resource, with factual books on a wide range of topics, with a focus on learning and self-improvement. currently have over 150 titles and the content on the site is growing quickly.
If you click on the “Download PDF” link, you have to pay 7.99 pounds or equivalent.
The “free” ebook is only for the downloadable web pages for each section. They include the figures. It’s just more of a hassle to download than a PDF.
Cheers — Randy
Concur with comments by Randy Seaver.
After reading Randy’s and Richard’s comments, I first read/ skimmed all of the html pages to see if the was anything of value in the eBook. There is — despite being written over the Apr-Sept 2006 period. The biggest “out-of-date flaw” is the genealogy software chapter. The Family Tree Maker (FTM) described is pre-FTM2008 — when an enormous rewrite occurred — with resultant bad things happening to many FTM users [a story fully covered elsewhere on the www]. Legacy has just recently released a major update as have others (e.g. RootsMagic [US & UK] and Family Historian [UK]).
As a family historian residing on the west side of “the pond” who has many British roots, I found the content of Diane Marelli’s eBook extremely comprehensive and well structured. She uses various online resources that are still available today but all with even more coverage added since 2006.
She generously illustrates her progressive research steps with screen captured images as she susses out one tidbit after another switching back and forth among several “key” databases to build a five-generation family tree, virtually from scratch. I found it all extremely helpful… I’ve used many of her techniques in the past but did not knit my results together nearly as effectively as she has demonstrated. Her added commentary on what to look for in each resource plus descriptive explanations to help interpret the uniquely British information/ terminology are invaluable.
I decided to put a bit of effort into getting a “free” copy of the book’s contents.
I was able to use my Firefox browser with the “Nuke Everything – Enhanced” Add-on extension to strip off all the page content not integral to each viewable webpage (1 page for each of the 10 chapters). Then I simply copied & pasted the chapter directly from Firefox into a new MS Word (2003) document.
Every page was complete, including images — there were no content exclusions. I did a bit of editing on the final document and wound up with a 230 (!!) page “book” (file size ~15 MB, due in large part from all the images included).
The process took somewhere between 2-3 hours — but well worth it for the quality product I obtained “for free”.
//Gord
ps: By way of file size vs information content comparison, here’s another freebie this Memorial Day weekend. It is a 31 page free to download pdf file of 2310 named Revolutionary War Officers – see http://www.genealogybank.com/free/ – that is about 46MB [content is page images so you have to visually scan — the file is not otherwise “searchable”].
Apologies – the Firefox Add-on extension is “Nuke Anything Enhanced”, available at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/951
//Gord
Apologies — the correct name of the Firefox Add-on extension I referred to is “Nuke Anything Enhanced” — it can be found at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/951
I should clarify that the add-on “hides” rather than “strips off” content that you do not want to copy. In the event of erroneously hiding too much (like your target content!), there is an “undo” option. The “Remove this object” command resides in the right-click context menu. The “Undo last remove” does not appear in the context menu unless there is a “remove” to actually undo. // Gord