CLAIRE JARVIS is a qualified archivist with a PhD in History from Cambridge University. She was a research fellow and data analyst at London University in the 1990s, and co-authored three books and several research papers. She has lectured in family history at Birkbeck College and Morley College. She now runs the successful business Jarvis Transcriptions which provides archive services and transcriptions and translations from Latin of historical documents to genealogists, local historians and academics. She also runs palaeography workshops and online tutorials for local historians in the UK and abroad.

"The text is eminently practical throughout, focusing on the types of records that genealogists and local historians use, and want to obtain."