From time to time I check in on the National Archives site to see what's new there. It's an incredible resource although some patience and determined searching is needed to get results, especially if you are researching a common name, or a surname that is also a commonly used word - try BINDING or CATER, for example, and you pull up all kinds of documents which contain those words.
This week, however, I discovered some new leads on my CATER ancestors in Bedfordshire - documents from Leicester & Rutland Record Office have been included since my last visit. They mention my ancestor Andrew CATER, clerk of Elstow, and his wife Alice nee CLARKE, and property in the village of Wrestlingworth. Entering "Wrestlingworth" as a search term gave me lots of CLARKE entries, and cross-referencing these with PRO Wills and parish register transcripts has helped me draw up an extensive CLARKE tree, going back a further 2 generations on Alice's maternal and paternal lines. Alice was my 8xgt grandmother, so these are some of the earliest ancestors in my tree. The Wills and some other documents are downloadable, so I don't even need to rely on other people's transcriptions but can struggle through and make my own!
When I began researching in the 1970's, the only way to gain any information was to travel to the locality and search original documents in dusty record offices. My annual holidays were planned around such road trips, often camping nearby, and washing off the grime of the books before tucking into a picnic. Now so much information is online, even scans of original documents, and networking with other researchers allows those of us who can't travel much the chance to check transcripts against the originals. What might have taken months or years to discover can now be done in minutes, from an armchair at home.
But it's important not to lose sight of the need to check transcripts against original sources, and to look for corroborating evidence. Just because your ancestor had an uncommon name, for example, not everyone with that same name is related! Newer ways of working have cut corners for us, but the method remains the same.
