Why visit an archive?

If you have subscribed to the top online family history records sites, and have managed from these to make a fair bit of progress on your ancestral research before coming to a sudden stop as you run out of ‘hits’, the end of your genealogical efforts are not nigh! If anything, they are only beginning to get underway, as there is so much more to explore.

Every record collection that is hosted by an online genealogy site is sourced from an archive repository somewhere, but the vast holdings of sites such as Ancestry, Findmypast and TheGenealogist are a mere drop in the ocean compared to what exists in the wider world.