Tracing English ancestors in the past generally meant that you had to travel.  Either to London, or to the relevant county record office to look at census records.  Many parish registers were still held at the relevant church so you often had to travel to remote villages in order to find your rural ancestors.

Genealogists today have it easy.  Anyone with internet access can sit in the comfort of their own armchair with a laptop, choose out of several genealogy sites and search the civil registration indexes with a few clicks.  You can view all the census records, and if you have difficulty deciphering some of the writing there are often transcripts provided for you.  While you still need mostly to search parish registers in local county record offices (where they now have to reside), you can use the online International Genealogical Index provided by the Church of the Latter Day Saints to help with your parish searches.

It is no wonder that genealogy has increased in popularity over the last couple of decades.

However, there are so many genealogy sites now that it can be difficult to know where to start with your family tree. 

Personally, I use three main sites for my searches, and occasionally use others when I want something more specific (such as Irish ancestry).    They provide me with the main information that I need.

If you are just starting and want to use an online site to start your searches, you need to decide whether you are just going to dabble a bit or whether this is going to be a full time hobby.

If you are going to do this seriously and spend regular time I would suggest you take out a subscription to Ancestry.co.uk.  You don’t need to subscribe to anything higher than the basic subscription to start with and this will give you the freedom to search the civil registration indexes, census records (1841-1901 at present) whenever you want to.

You can also search military records, passenger lists (though you will have to upgrade your subscription to view the records), and add your family tree to the One World Tree, and see if someone else has your ancestors on their tree.

My one warning about using Ancestry is that there are numerous errors in the indexes and transcriptions.  Names and places have been spelled or “guessed” wrongly and so may not turn up when you use the search tool.  You may need to try several spellings of your ancestor’s name, and use different search criteria when searching if you do not find the person you are looking for straight away.

If you just want to try out a few searches to see what’s there, or you think you will only be searching your ancestors now and then, I would suggest you start with Find My Past.  Here, you can buy credits for a one-off payment and then use those credits for your searches.  At present you can buy 60 credits for £6.95 or 280 credits for £24.95 with which you can search all the civil registration indexes, all the census records (including the 1911 census), migration, military and other records.

At the moment, Find My Past is the only site where you can view the 1911 census, though in 2011 this should also be available on Ancestry.co.uk as well.

The other site that I use a lot is Family Search.   This is where you can search the International Genealogical Index which attempts to list baptism, marriage and some burial records from parish registers.  This is a very useful tool if you are searching an elusive ancestor or you cannot get to the county record offices to view the parish registers.  However, any information found here should always be backed up by a proper search at the appropriate parish register.  Also you need to remember that this is not a full index.  If you cannot find your ancestor here it does not mean the documents do not exist.  Some areas are better covered than others.  If you do not have access to the local county records offices, you need to back up your findings by using local genealogists.

If you want to find out if someone else has some of your ancestors on their tree, I recommend Genes Reunited where you can add your own tree and get in contact with people who have common ancestors.

There are many other genealogy sites (you can see some more links on the right hand panel), but those I have described above are the ones that I use most of all and are probably the best place to start if you are just starting out with tracing ancestors.

Good luck!

There are many websites that you can use to trace your UK family history, but one that makes it easy to search different kinds of records, including the census, births, marriages and deaths, and military records, is Find My Past.

Find My Past is based in London and carries more than half a billion family history records. They have an extremely good reputation for accuracy and excellent customer support.

They were the first to allow public access to birth, marriage and death records online, and were originally known as 1837online.com (because this was the year that these records began).

Find My Past offers a very good payment system for viewing records. If you do not want to pay an ongoing subscription (as some other sites only offer) you can Pay as You Go, paying for just a few viewing credits at a time. This is very useful if you only want to look at one record, or you don’t have time to use the site regularly.

However, if you do want to subscribe, their monthly rate is extremely reasonable, currently at £7.50 per month.

If you are carrying out UK ancestry research, I highly recommend that you use Find My Past to get you started.

If you have tried to find your ancestors on the online census indexes or birth, marriage and death indexes, but have been unable to get any results, don’t give up.  Remember that these indexes have been copied from handwriting, which can often be very difficult to read.  Errors are far more common than you might think.

Sometimes, it is not even the transcribers fault!  To give you an example of this, I tried for a very long time to find my grandfather, Francis McEwen on the 1871 census.  As he was later known as Francis MANLEY, I had tried every possible spelling of both surnames on the Ancestry.co.uk indexes, using the phonetic search, and trying out every possible spelling of McEwen (which are many!).

Eventually,  in desperation, I tried taking out the Christian name.  In looking through the long list that followed I found this entry:

Fracis McEwen, born about 1865, Ardwick, Manchester.

Bingo!

All that was missing was that little “n” – and when I looked at the original census document, I found that it was the fault of the enumerator, not the transcriber!

This little discovery led to a whole new breakthrough in my Manley/McEwen ancestry and uncovered a mystery surrounding my grandfather’s parentage.

This all goes to show that if you are having difficulty finding your ancestor on these indexes, you really need to spend some time with different surname and Christian name spellings.  Of course, you can un-check the “exact spelling” box to enable a phonetic search – but do not rely on this.  There has been many a time when I have found an ancestor by trying a different spelling myself when it had not come up under a phonetic search.

On Ancestry.co.uk, you can search for a surname without a Christian name, or vice versa, and it is certainly worth doing this if you are getting no results – unless, of course, your ancestors surname is something like Smith or Brown, in which case you will get far too many results from the surname alone!

Equally, entering the Christian name without the surname is only really effective if you have a fairly unusual name or you are searching within a very small parish.

Using genealogy records online is not as straight forward as it may seem, and there is a real knack to using the online indexes.  The trick is to keep trying every possible spelling or mis-spelling of your family surnames, and don’t forget to try variations of all the other search criteria, such as location and relationship too.  Even male and female have been known to get muddled up!

Happy hunting!

The most useful records are settlement examinations.  The Settlement Act of 1662 placed restrictions on who was able to claim relief.  This protected parishes from having to provide poor relief to people who did not have adequate links to the parish.   Families wanting to move to a particular parish had to be examined by parish officials before they could legally  settle there.  If they were not thought suitable, they could be forcibly removed.

If you think your ancestors might have applied for poor relief, you can search the settlement records, and if you are lucky, you may find information like this:

Elizabeth Joseph (33) of 18 Petticoat Lane married her late husband Lewis Joseph 4 Jun 1850 at Great Synagogue and has 5 children Rachel Joseph (12), Emanuel Joseph (11), Sarah Joseph (9), Ann Joseph (7) and Joseph Joseph (2 ½); about 1852 husband took 35 Petticoat Lane at £8 15s per quarter and stayed 2-3 years and at same time 50 Petticoat Lane at £1 p.w. and husband occupied shop and bakehouse at 35 and let rest out; husband died Christmas 1860. 15 Jun 1863. (Copied from the Origins Network Website)

You can find settlement records in County Record Offices all over the country, but if your ancestors were in London, it is certainly worth checking the indexes at The Origins Network

The first two sets available cover the parishes of St Botolph Aldgate and St Sepulchre, and contain over 20,000 names.  Keep checking back as they will be regularly adding to this series.

To get access to the poor law records series if you are searching London genealogy, go to this link: The Origins Network and subscribe for membership (you can join for 3 days only for a small fee, or pay monthly or yearly).  You will then be able to navigate to the British Origins pages and then to the Poor Law collection.

Ros Bott

I was able to join for free because it costs nothing just to register and build your current family tree on the site.

I did not really expect to find many people linking with my own family tree, but I was amazed at how many possible links there might be, and once I realised that some of these links were definite branches of my own tree, I wanted to start communicating with the other members.  This of course means paying a fee, but it was really worth it to find various distant cousins and make contact with them.

Not only that, but these contacts allowed me to add 100s of names to my own family tree, and I even acquired a couple of pictures of my ancestors from my contacts!

Of course, like any online research, the information found via Genes Reunited should always be backed up by proper research, but it is certainly worth paying the fee to make contacts because you could very easily make break-throughs on lines you thought had come to a dead end.

Genes Reunited also gives you access to census records, birth marriage and death indexes, and military records (including WW1 & 2 death records) by a pay per view system.

Of all genealogy websites, Genes Reunited is probably one of the most well known and popular ancestor finder sites on the internet, and the reasons for this are not difficult to see.  You are very likely to find more names for your family tree than you thought possible!

To find out more go to: www.GenesReunited.co.uk