Finding Anyone, Anywhere, Anywhen

Sandy Campbell is a reference librarian in the Science and Technology Library at the University of Alberta.

Occasionally someone with a great deal of amateur experience in a field
writes a book to give the world the benefit of their experience and
knowledge. Such is the case with this work by Noel Elliot.

This is a genealogical work that supersedes an earlier work by the same
author. The book is in two parts, a commentary on the tricks and
techniques of genealogical research, followed by a directory of related
websites. The commentary is largely a first-person narrative about the
author’s experiences and opinions on many issues, some of them only
marginally related to genealogy. Some of the content is speculation,
such as his discussion of our earliest ancestors. Other parts are
discussions of well-known issues that are authoritatively documented
elsewhere, such as the history of the development of the Internet. The
most highly touted “tricks,” such as the interpretation of genealogy
from heraldic sources, would be new information only to novice
researchers.

The second part of the book, the website directory, is an extensive
list of URLs by country or jurisdiction. Many of the sites are subsets
of large well-known sites (such as RootsWeb), simply repeated, with the
appropriate extensions for each jurisdiction. The print copy of this
list will date quickly, but the author assures us that we can find a
continually updated version at the Genealogical Research Library, Inc.
(GRL) website. This, however, is a for-fee site. GRL appears to be a
non-profit organization. Its website, which offers a genealogical search
engine, is cited frequently in the book. However, in brief tests that I
did, the free LDS Family Search site significantly outperformed this
service.

This volume would be most useful to an absolute novice who does not
wish to plough though listings from a Google search to find genealogical
websites, or perhaps to someone who studies genealogists. Libraries with
very active genealogical research communities and large budgets may wish
to purchase this work as a secondary tool. Libraries with limited
resources will give the standard Canadian genealogical resources a
higher priority than this work.