The National Archives (TNA) have launched a new version of their Research Guides, which they have renamed 'Help with your research'; this is still in 'beta', i.e. might need a bit of tweaking by the techies, but these pages are fully usable and, in my view, a great improvement. Everything is explained in this recent blog post: https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/...site-redesign/ and from there you can click through to 'Help with your research'.

The categories for the new guides are now better integrated, e.g. you can find out about birth registration from the 'Family History' guide and also from 'Records for current legal purposes', about researching WW1 from 'Family History' and from 'First World War', and there will be lots of other examples too. TNA state which records have been digitised, and you could opt to use these new-style guides for only digitised records (which might save some frustration if you are new to all this). This means that the new-style guides can be used at many different levels - old hands know what they are doing and can understand the indexing, but novices need help.

Once you start to understand TNA's amazing website, you really do have the key to unlocking so much stuff that will be pertinent to your researches. And while you are on the website, do click around - discover the blogs, the labs, the bookshop, the online community (aka forum), and take a look at how TNA use social media. There is just so much there, so get clicking!

Owl