The pursuit of family history has attracted ever increasing numbers of devotees since its early adoption as a popular leisure pursuit in the late 1970’s.

In Britain television programmes such as such as the newsreader Gordon Honeycombe’s ‘Discovering your Family History’, and the hugely successful American series ‘Roots’, introduced family history to a far wider audience than had previously been the case.

The explosion in interest of genealogy as a hobby for all age groups has barely slowed since that time, and recently in tandem with that huge increase has come a proportionate burgeoning in the amount of original material (and the means of access to it), online or via CD/DVD.

Much of the initial donkey work of family history research has now been substantially reduced, and in many cases if you have access to the internet your research can ‘hit the ground running’ with your early enquiries. However, implicit in this is the very real danger that an inexperienced researcher will chance upon a name or piece of information that ‘fits the bill’, and then pursue his/her research without first corroborating that the findings are actually relevant.

Whilst the basic seeds of information are indeed now readily available to all, so has the scope increased for fundamental and far-reaching errors in interpretation or procedure.

The work of the professional genealogist has changed greatly since the early flickerings of interest in family history in the 1970’s. Where once the genealogist would need to pursue each single family event step by step, very often having to wait for the information from one document to be made available before moving on to a search for the next link in the chain, he or she is now very often presented with a substantial range of indexed sources enabling progress to be made across several search ‘fronts’ at the same time.

It was frequently necessary to attempt to trace several events from the same generation of a family, in order to gain that single piece of detail which would enable research to proceed back to an earlier generation. Although this situation can still be valid, it is far less the case than before. This certainly does not imply however that the work of the genealogist is no longer required. Far from it in fact.

Almost all family historians having progressed through the early stages of research find themselves faced with the problem of having to seek information which is unavailable online and completely unfamiliar to them. In very many cases they will not even know how to proceed or where the required information can be obtained.

Perversely, such has been the wealth of material opened up to family historians by utilising newly indexed sources, that it can be a hugely intimidating task to determine where to find those vital nuggets of information, and how they should be utilised.

The sheer scale of the holdings at such repositories as the National Archives, the British Library, the Guildhall Library , the London Metropolitan Archives , and the Society of Genealogists , necessitates a considerable degree of knowledge and expertise before they can be used to best advantage. It is the aim of the London Research Service to provide a service fully commensurate with this.