In message of 13 Dec, "Kurt" <kurt.fredriksson@ieee.org> wrote: > I for myself is only recording facts. For that the current programs > are sufficient. As I am a Swede, I have the church books for births, > weddings and deaths as primary sources. They were written at the time > of the event. I do hope your church books are a bit better that the ones we have in England as they only give the bare names. Further for births, the early ones don't give the mother and the marriages do not give the parents of either party nor the location of the bridegroom. This can make it very difficult to be sure that you have identified the right person. > When there is no church books, I stop. Why? Some other documents that survive from the person's lifetime can be just as meaningful and sometimes a lot more so. > That makes it possible for me to get to around 1650 for some lines, > but mostly to around 1700. >From a false premise follows a false conclusion? > I leave the going back 6-700 years to the novelists. Again you may not have the marvellous survival of early records that we have in England. But we have wills from the thirteenth century onwards, marriage settlements certainly since the 12th century, law court cases disputing succession by inheritance also since the 12th century. Finally all house owners had to have a big box of all the deeds conveying the house from person to person over the centuries as this proved their ownership; another resource. These are not the material of novelists and it is perfectly possible to establish reasonably valid ancestries well back to the eleventh century, notably to some of the 36,000 people recorded in Domesday. -- Tim Powys-Lybbe                                          tim@powys.org              For a miscellany of bygones: http://powys.org/