I'm sure that many readers will have become frustrated in their research and reached the limits of Ancestry.co.uk and Google. So here are a few tips that may open new avenues for you.
Many resources do not allow Google to search their databases. There are many digital archives and a number will reward the family historian with a mass of new information. Most archives are free to search, like Ancestry.co.uk, but accessing the information has a cost.
The Times Archive has a monumental 1573 entries satisfying the search term 'egville'. It also shows the context in which the term is found so in most cases it is obvious whether the information will be of interest. A day pass costs £4.95 and seems good value.
The British Library catalogue holds 14 million books and 920,000 journal and newspaper titles. Works by members of the d'Egville family are held by the Library and appear in the catalogue. However, newspaper titles must be searched seperately and the search terms 'egville', 'd'egville' and 'degville' return no results.
This demonstrates a common failing; any catalogue is only as good as the index. We can deduce that the British Library newspaper and journal collection must include articles about members of the d'Egville family because of the wealth of information in the Times Archive.
These are much better accessed through the British Newspapers webpage of the British Library although the catalogue only extends from 1800-1900. As with the Times Archive a day pass must be bought.
Gallica, a service of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), is in contrast entirely free. The online documents are not the complete collection of the BnF but a search provides some tantalising information. While the search engine is accessible in English most of the documents are written in French.
Links to all these sites and others are now available in the upper right area of the screen.
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