The second edition of Tracing Your Northern Irish Ancestors is an expert introduction for the family historian to the wealth of material available to researchers in archives throughout Northern Ireland. Many records, like the early twentieth-century census returns and school registers, will be familiar to researchers, but others are often overlooked by all but the most experienced of genealogists. An easy-to-use, informative guide to the comprehensive collections available at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland is a key feature of Ian Maxwells handbook. He also takes the reader through the records held in many libraries, museums and heritage centres across the province, and he provides detailed coverage of records that are available online. Unlike the rest of the British Isles, which has very extensive civil and census records, Irish ancestral research is hampered by the destruction of many of the major collections. Yet Ian Maxwell shows how family historians can make good use of church records, school registers and land and valuation records to trace their roots to the beginning of the nineteenth century and beyond.

The Belfast of the first decade of the 19th century was a bustling and growing town of some 22,000 inhabitants. It was dominated by the cotton industry and the linen trade. The foundations of such potentially important enterprises as engineering and shipbuilding were being laid. Yet this was still a period when a trip to Dublin took 21 hours by coach (with a double guard for extra security) and when the inhabitants were ferried around the town by sedan chair. The directories here reprinted, from unique copies in the Linen Hall Library, vividly recreate this Belfast of cotton mills and learned societies, sailmakers and booksellers. It will be of interest both to genealogists and to those who care for the history of Belfast.

The text provides a broad explanation of the physiology for plants (their functions) from seed germination to vegetative growth, maturation, and flowering. It presents principles and results of previous and ongoing research throughout the world.

Straddling parts of Counties Antrim and Down, the city of Belfast has seen its fair share of history across the centuries. From its humble beginnings as a ford based settlement between two tributaries of the River Lagan, it grew following its grant of a charter in 1613 to become a corporation town, and expanded dramatically when later made a city in 1888. Along the way it has experienced the darkest of times, including the Belfast Blitz and the recent Troubles, to some of the most enlightened developments across Ireland and the UK. In Tracing Your Belfast Ancestors, genealogist and best-selling author Chris Paton returns home to provide a research gateway for those wishing to trace their ancestors from the Northern Irish capital. With a concise summary of the city's history, a tour of some of the city's most amazing archives, libraries and museums, and a detailed overview of the records generated by those who came before, he expertly steers the reader towards centuries of ancestral exploration, both through online resources and within the city of Belfast itself – and with a wee bit of craic along the way!