Interesting! I'm going to be in and out today - we have visitors - but I'd like to get the discussion going with the following question, intended to be a bit provocative: As archives and other important records increasingly go online, does travel become less necessary?
@AmericanLuke Indeed, I'm pretty new at this too - only been at it for a year or so. I'd like to think I'm young ;-)
But there aren't that many things I can think of that aren't available online, or planned to be so.
The only thing I've hit in my own researches that I'd have to travel to get is the record behind this question on the site.
Hi @MartinSojka - have you considered travelling for your research? I know your family comes from places that are harder to research online. I'm Australian but my whole tree is British, which makes things easy.
@Verbeia I do travel already. :) I was in southern Poland (around Katowice) earlier this year, gathered family stories, copied old photographs and got told who's on them, and researched in church and state archives.
The good part is that my family still lives around in the "old" places, so as long as I manage to get in contact with them, I can offload the research to them. :D
@MartinSojka That's excellent! All my family arrived in Australia by 1880, so that's a bit hard for me. And it's the same for my in-laws. There are no family back in the UK for them either.
@Verbeia You just didn't dig deep enough, I guess. I have contact with relatives where our last common ancestor was already long dead by 1880. :D
When your average family has 4+ children which survived to adulthood, there's a lot of them.
For online archives though, it's very regional. Southern Poland (Silesia specifically) is very good for historical documents, since the Silesian Digital Library is already huge and growing in leaps and bounds. Church archives, not so much. Eastern Poland (around Lublin and so on) have it other way around.
@MartinSojka Oh, yes, to be fair, I have made contact with long-distant relatives, including another Australian woman whose latest common ancestor died in the mid 1600s! (Isle of Man archives are quite complete and because it was such a small place, not hard to trace.)
But I don't have contact with any relatives still in the UK that link up any closer than that.
So I have lots of online sources for my "Lublin area" side of family - birth, marriage and death certificates - and only few, but interesting, sources for my "Silesian" side of family - stuff like newspapers reporting about my great-grandfather's concert band.
At least that's for my family. My partner's family only left the UK after WW2, and there are still cousins there. I have had a good collaboration with my mother-in-law's cousin.
@MartinSojka Newspapers are an interesting source - like finding the wedding announcement of my widowed great-grandfather - a wedding my father was completely unaware of!
My biggest hurdle to all of his research isn't so much travel anyway. Almost everything is within 2000km or so from where I live. It's the fact I need to read handwritten old texts in at least Polish, German, Russian and Latin. And I don't actually know Latin, I basically "learn on the job". ;)
Good thing I didn't get a request to dig deeper into the Hungarian noblesse side of my cousin's side ... yet. I know even less of Hungarian than I know of Latin.
Hell, I don't even know how to say their family name properly ("Kállay-Gyöngyössy"), and I was told a few times. :D
@MartinSojka :-) I did Latin at school, but interestingly there isn't much call for it in my research, at least not until I start getting into transcribing original wills.
It's 5:49 am EST Sat the 5th - this is the first time I'm trying the Sat chat - did I miss it? If not, I went to a town about 2 hours from me to research records in the church some of my family attended. I would not have found those records online.
Speaking about the topic at hand: From personal experience, the best kind of genealogical travel is the one where you already have relatives you have contact to in the area and can simply visit them and talk about the family history.
It gets you new information, new perspectives, and lots of goodwill from those folks when you take your time to listen to them - especially when they're older.
... and now I'm trying to always remember to call them for birthdays and the like and keep the contact. Little work, much reward. :D
Lucky. Most marriage records from the area I'm focusing on only have the two spouses, the date, the location, and (if we're lucky) the the first names of the bride and groom's fathers
@MartinSojka That site is extremely helpful :)
Do you have any ideas where to look for a 1711 birth certificate from Steinheim an der Murr, Wurttemberg?
(besides the main familysearch.org Germany birth and baptisms collection)
