Sharing Your Family History Online

Chris Paton • £12.99
pen-and-sword.co.uk

For many enthusiasts pursuing their family history research, the online world offers a seemingly endless archive of digitised materials to help us answer the questions posed by our ancestors. In addition to hosting records, however, the internet also offers a unique platform on which we can host our research and lure in prospective cousins from around the world, to help build up a larger shared ancestral story.

In this book, genealogist and DYAwriter Chris Paton explores the many ways in which we can present our research and encourage collaboration online. He details the many organisations and social media applications that can permit cooperation, describes the software platforms on which we can collate our stories, and illustrates the many ways in which we can publish our stories online.

He also explores how we can make our research work further for us, by drawing in experts and distant cousins from around the world to help us break our ancestral brick walls, not just through sharing stories, but by accessing uniquely held documentation by family members around the world, including our own shared DNA.

German Prisoners of the Great War: Life in a Yorkshire Camp

Anne Buckley (ed.) • £25
pen-and-sword.co.uk

In Munich in 1920, just after the end of the First World War, German officers who had been prisoners of war in England published a book they had written and smuggled back to Germany. Through vivid text and illustrations they describe in detail their experience of life in captivity in a camp at Skipton in Yorkshire. Their work, now translated into English for the first time, gives us a unique insight into their feelings about the war, their captors and their longing to go home.

In their own words they record the conditions, the daily routines, the food, their relationship with the prison authorities, their activities and entertainments, and their thoughts of their homeland. The challenges and privations they faced are part of their story, as is the community they created within the confines of the camp. The whole gamut of their existence is portrayed here, in particular through their drawings and cartoons which are reproduced alongside the translation.

The Chester Creek Murders

Nathan Dylan Goodwin • £8.99
amazon.co.uk

When Detective Clayton Tyler is tasked with reviewing the formidable archives of unsolved homicides in his police department’s vaults, he settles on one particular cold case from the 1980s: The Chester Creek Murders. Three young women were brutally murdered—their bodies dumped in Chester Creek, Delaware County—by a serial killer who has confounded a slew of detectives and evaded capture for over 38 years. With no new leads or information at his disposal, the detective contacts Venator for help, a company that uses cutting-edge investigative genetic genealogy to profile perpetrators solely from DNA evidence. Taking on the case, Madison Scott-Barnhart and her small team at Venator must use their forensic genealogical expertise to attempt finally to bring the serial killer to justice. Madison, meanwhile, has to weigh professional and personal issues carefully, including the looming five-year anniversary of her husband’s disappearance.

This latest book from genealogy crime novelist Goodwin promises to be another page-turner.

Family History Record Book 2

Heritage Hunter • £9.99
amazon.co.uk

This is a follow-up to the first Family History Record Book and enables you to record details of two further generations of your ancestors. Using the two books together, you can now record your research into more than 1,000 ancestors, across ten generations.