Useless information

Some months ago, I bought a copy of The Independent and I got a promotional book for free with it: Trace Your Family History, a shortened version of the Teach Yourself book.

The book obviously has lots of information about how to find out about births, marriages and deaths in the various parts of the British Isles, but more surprisingly, it also covers Canada and the US.

How useful is that? As far as I know, while many Americans and Canadians have British ancestry, very few people have historically moved the other way. On the other hand, lots of British people have French, German, Italian, Polish or other continental European ancestry, but these countries aren’t even mentioned in the book.

I do realise it’s easier to write a book about English-speaking countries, but shouldn’t they have written a book about what people needed to know instead?