Who Do You Think You Are? Live (28th Feb 2009)

Yesterday I attended Who Do You Think You Are? Live at Olympia in London.

We had a really good day. We arrived at 9.45 am and headed straight to the 10am workshop presentation on Irish Records at the National Archives. There was a lot of information but I picked up a few tips that I want to follow up in the future. I made lots of notes so hopefully they will still make sense when I come back to them. I might even take a day to travel to Kew and visit the Archives in the future.

Here are a couple of photos showing the view from the gallery at about 11am. As you can see there are quite a lot of people around.



We then headed for the stands in the Irish section and had a chat with a very helpful girl on the PRONI (Public Records Office for Northern Ireland) stand. She helped us with possible lines of investigation such as the Wills on their website. She confirmed that I need to try and get hold of some of the certificates for my Northern Irish ancestors to help firm up dates and locations. Since chatting to her I'm hoping to go over to Belfast for the day to have a proper look at their records and will take on board her tips for preparing beforehand.

After wandering through the stands for a bit longer we stopped for lunch. The queues for the food outlets were long and there was always a mad dash for seats as soon as any were vacated.

The next stop was to investigate the offerings of the different genealogical societies. We chatted to people on the Berkshire and the Ulster tables. Everyone we spoke to was very knowledgeable about their area and we picked up tips along the way. I hadn't realised how much work the family history societies do - many had cd's of transcribed information that had taken years of work to put together.

We managed to not spend too much money - I picked up a couple of books including the latest version of the Genealogist's Internet which is very useful.

By this point in the day I had brain ache!!! There was so much information that it was difficult to take it all in so we headed home about 2pm but we could have stayed longer.

I'm sure I've forgotten lots of details already so I may do a second post later on after I've had a bit more time to think about it.