A Guide to Selected Genealogical Reference Works
As time goes by, ever more sources of genealogical information become available online. This page is not going to cover the "obvious" sources (BMD and parish records at Ancestry, FamilySearch etc) but rather provides a short commentary on the various genealogy works that have been published over the last 200 years, many of which are now out of copyright and available for free. Given my own family history, these reference works all focus on the British Isles.
I will cover:
- Armorial Families
- Burke's ("Landed Gentry/Commoners", Burke's Peerage etc)
- Familiæ Minorum Gentium
- Lincolnshire Pedigrees
- Miscelleanea Genealogica et Heraldica
These works are all digitised to varying degrees; you will usually find freely-accessible digitised books at either Google Books, Archive.org or the Hathi Trust. Physical copies may be available at your local library. The trick, of course, is to know which work you need. Some, but by no means all, these digital copies have been OCR'd, making them searchable and so these volumes may yield results when searching names online (e.g. google.com or bing.com). Unfortunately there are many that are not searchable digitally, which means you will need to have to painfully scroll down dozens of indexes in the hope of finding something useful. One site that has done a lot of the work for you is stirnet.com, so well worth a visit (and often appears in search results).
The following section will cover some of the main reference works for British family heritage, giving you a general idea of the scope of these works. In some instances, more detailed sub-pages can be found by following the links within each section.
A Note On Reliability
None of these works can be counted on to be fully reliable. Many were compiled using limited primary records (though many also take note to carefully document their data sources) and a healthy dash of wishful thinking. When it's important, I'd recommend supplementing any of these reference works with some research for primary records (BMD and/or parish) to confirm or deny the pedigree information they contain.
Armorial Families
Burke's
A wide-ranging set of publications has been published under the general umbrella of Burke's. The most recent versions are available, for a subscription, directly from the publisher's website. The most useful include the following series:
- The
Landed Gentry series is likely to be the most fruitful source of family pedigrees for most people who aren't themselves peers (i.e. basically everybody). Burke's Peerage provides pedigrees for both peers (Marquesses, Earls etc) as well as BaronetsExtinct Peerages andExtinct and Dormant Baronetcies cover peerages or baronetcies that no longer exist (usually dying out through lack of a male heir, but sometimes through attainder)Burke's Family Records (first published 1897) tackled additional notable families who did not qualify to be covered within the Landed Gentry or Peerage seriesHeraldic Illustrations provides more pedigrees and, as the name suggests, illustrated coats of arms for some families ("the Principal Families of the Empire")



Familiæ Minorum Gentium
Oftened abbreviated to FMG on my site,
There are four volumes, each arranged alphabetically by surname from A to Z (i.e. each volume covers the full alphabet). The entries themselves consist of tree-form pedigrees, with some footnotes dotted here and there (particularly where Hunter doubted the authenticity of a connection, or noted a relationship to another pedigree given elsewhere in his work). Volume 4 includes a complete index to all the pedigrees.
Lincolnshire Pedigrees
As it name suggests, these are a collection of pedigrees specifically of Lincolnshire families, edited by the Rev. AR Maddison and published by the Harleian Society between 1902 and 1906. There are four volumes. The pedigrees are based on the Lincolnshire Visitation of 1634, with support from the earlier Visitations (1562 and 1592), the later 1666 Visitation and local parish registers where available.
- Volume 1: A-F
- Volume 2: G-O
- Volume 3: P-Y
- Volume 4: Additional Pedigrees (A-Z)
Miscelleanea Genealogica et Heraldica
Where to start? This is a massive collection of, as the name suggests, miscellaneous genealogical information. There were five series published, between 1868 and 1938, each series consisting of two or more volumes. Entries could include pedigrees, armorial bearings, transcriptions of parish registers, transcriptions of wills and more besides. A major part of these books was the notes and queries section, where people could write in with genealogical questions and hope that in subsequent volumes, an answer would be provided.
One of the chief difficulties with MGH is the lack of a clear index. Contents pages are divided by theme (Arms, Autographs, Monumental Inscriptions etc) rather than by surname. And whilst a given volume might spend quite a lot of time on a particular family, the pages are not always contiguous, so you have to jump around all over the place trying to find all the relevant sections. In the case of notes & queries, the relevant responses might be found in later volumes entirely.