A full class of eager amateur genealogists have filled a new evening course which aims to help people trace their family roots and get them started on mapping out their family tree
Tracing Your Family Roots: An introduction, is led by Muriel Alexander Forth Valley College’s University Partnership Officer – who is also a professional genealogist – and is currently being held at the College’s Stirling Campus.
Muriel said: “It is great that there is so much interest in the course. It is suitable for anyone new to family history or who has little knowledge of how to trace their family roots. It focusses largely on using Scottish records, but the techniques used can be applied to search records in other countries. It looks at civil registration of births, marriages, deaths, census records, parish registers, as well as covering other useful traditional and online resources which can be used to trace ancestors.
“I managed to turn a hobby into a business, but decided to move back to work in education again. However there is enormous interest and enthusiasm from people to pursue this hobby too, especially with programmes such as Who Do You Think You Are on the TV. This is an ideal opportunity to deliver a course to start people off on their journey to trace their family roots. I do warn them all though, this hobby can be addictive and you might never recover from it!”