B1 Preliminary (PET) Practice Paper 27

alice: Hello, I'm trying to research my family history. Where should I start here? george: Welcome! I'd suggest starting with our online catalogue, where you can search birth, marriage, and death records. alice: That sounds useful. Do I need to book an appointment, or can I just use the computers now? george: You can use the computers now, but if you need help from a researcher, it's best to book in advance. alice: Okay, and is there a charge for using the archive? george: Access to the computers is free, but printing documents costs twenty pence per page. alice: That's fine. Roughly how far back do the records go? george: Our records generally go back to the early eighteen hundreds, though some parish records go back even further. alice: Excellent. If I find something interesting, can I take photographs instead of printing? george: Yes, photography is allowed for personal research, as long as you don't use flash.

When Oliver's grandmother passed away, she left behind boxes of old photographs, letters, and documents that nobody in the family had ever properly organised. Rather than simply storing the boxes in an attic as previous generations had done, Oliver decided to spend his weekends over several months creating a digital family archive. The process turned out to be far more time-consuming than Oliver initially anticipated. Many photographs had no dates or names written on them, so he had to contact older relatives to help identify people and events. Some letters were written in his grandmother's native language, which Oliver could not read fluently, requiring him to ask a cousin for translation help. Despite the challenges, Oliver found the project deeply rewarding. He discovered stories about his grandmother's difficult journey as a young immigrant that she had rarely discussed during her lifetime, giving him a much deeper understanding of her character. Oliver has now shared the digital archive with the whole family, and several relatives have added their own memories and photographs, transforming it into an ongoing collaborative project rather than something finished and forgotten.

Family history projects ___1___ increasingly popular as digital tools make research and preservation easier than in the past. When my father ___2___ a collection of old letters in the attic, he had no idea they would lead to months of fascinating research. Many of the letters ___3___ written by relatives who had emigrated decades earlier, describing their difficult journeys and new lives abroad. My father ___4___ several weeks trying to trace what happened to these relatives afterwards, using online records and old newspaper archives. Eventually, he ___5___ a distant cousin living abroad who still had photographs matching the names in the letters. Since then, the two of them ___6___ regularly, sharing discoveries about their shared family history. My father now ___7___ that this project has connected him to relatives he never knew existed. He believes that everyone ___8___ at least once try to understand where their family came from.