Who Do You Think You Are Magazine

The October issue - which is also the 10th Birthday special issue - of the BBC Who Do You Think You Are magazine is out now.  Campaspe Regional Library members can download and read the online issue FREE now through our subscription with RB Digital, along with a range of other magazines.

Inside this month's issue

• Discover your London ancestors
  Dr Jonathan Oates shares tips for tracing forebears who lived in the capital
• 10th anniversary competition
  Win £1,000-worth of top prizes
• 10 tips for smarter census searching
  Laura Berry shares some advice for optimising your search results
• London's street children
  For many, Dickens's portrayal of street life was a grim reality, says Janet Sacks
• Holocaust records
  Jeanette R Rosenberg on key sources relating to Jewish family members during the Second World War
• Plus...
  The best free databases; the lives of ancestors who worked as gamekeepers; exploring Irish newspapers and more...

German scripts

I have just discovered a great website where you can type in your ancestral name and see what is would look like in several old German scripts.  As I have German ancestry and my one year of high school German was both a long time ago and totally inadequate to translating old documents, I'm finding it quite useful.  Anything that helps me decipher the old documents I find is great news, and as you can see from the scripts below, some of the results look nothing like the name I typed in.  So here is the name Beseler in several different scripts.

The surname Beseler in various scripts

 Some of these, yes, I can see it is the Beseler surname at a glance.  Others, not so easily.  If I was rapidly scanning a document I would probably not pick it up - in several the B looks like L, the Es look like Ns and the S is an F.