Tracing Your Ancestors
I have been asked on many ocassions now to give advice on how to trace family and ancestors. So, I thought I would write a brief page on how to get started on the net for free, and the main points to save you time.

Firstly, once you get into tracing your family and ancestors it can become very addictive. When all of a sudden a family member appears out of the woodwork who you never knew about or have been trying to find for a long time its so exciting and you can get carried away. If you are going to devote time to this subject then be prepared for highs and lows, but overall some great fun. A lot of the information you can now get free online, and many county records offices are transcribing their records onto the net, some run a look-up service and there are many online forums who will offer you help and advice. When I was tracing my own family tree I put up some information onto a forum and was contacted by a distant cousin whom I knew about, but had lost family contact with.

So, where do you start? Well I would say talk to family members and ask as much information as you can about your ancestors. Logical things are where did they live, what did they do. Stick for now with the male side of the family too, as women married into families and took on their husbands name, as many do now, even if you want to trace your grandmother's side, stick with your grandfather's for now and work back from him on the male surname, once you have some experience in one side you can then move to the female/maiden name side. If you are from a fairly common name, ie Smith in England, or Williams in Wales, you really do have to research as much information as possible to ensure you get the right family in the right place and are not heading down a branch of the family or even someone elses; there is nothing worse than clutching at straws in family history just to make a claim to a family, as in the long run it can be very soul destroying to find you are completely on the wrong path. If you are of a more well known name such as Seymour, then virtually everyone on the net is going to lay claim to be related to Jane Seymour who became Henry VIII's 3rd wife, but the Seymour family has more branches across the British Isles than the BT has phone exchanges, so tread carefully here (I have first hand experience with the Seymours, so I know what I am talking about!)

Listed at the bottom of this page are links to Free sites and sites you will have to pay for, but I have explained what you are paying for too which may help you save some time and money. To begin with you can search out a lot of information on the net for free. I have been lucky to trace back two sides of a family to the early 1600's and I haven't paid out a penny yet in birth certificates, but be aware that you may have to do this.

The first port of call has to be The Church of the Latter Day Saints website (link further down), which has literally thousands of entries, be warned though that some details are also doubled up, or even queadroupled on this site. You can do a search through their archives for the 1881 census records for free, but do ensure you know where you family were living, (roughly), at the time. Also this site will list Pedigree resources which as parish records from every county and also Ancestral Files, which are other people who have researched that family name and tree and have then uploaded it for others to use and see, which can be a great help. The only discrepancies I have found has been a lot of use of the word "abt" meaning About, because no-one knew a date, or the original record could not be read very well, or someone just guessed. Always bear in mind that when someone has entered this information they may not know the Actual name of the town and when inputting it to the database has mispelled something, or the town has changed it spelling slightly since the original record of the 1500's. In fact I have even known place names to have been swallowed up and disapear over time and no longer exist.

History of each individual area you are looking around can help. If you get a chance to visit where your ancestors came from, not only can you visit the local library where you can see original documents for births, marriages, deaths and all census records, but the staff are always willing to help as much as they can, and generally are very experienced in family records research. Also visiting a local area can give you an idea of what your family were doing, why were they in that area, did they start out there or migrate there for work. An example being a family moved from the South Wales area in the steel industry and mining to the North East when new work came along in the mid to late 1800's. A long way to travel for work, but many families migrated to a new county and even a new country.

So, to re-cap here are the things you need to know:

1......your grand or great grandfather's surname, possible dates of birth and area of birth
2......where did he work and what did he do
3......to ensure you have the right person, what were your aunties and uncles names, as they will be listed on census records too.
4......something of interest is that in the 1841 census everyone's age was rounded up to the nearest 5. So, if your family member was 27 their age was rounded up the being 30 years. Also women didn't always give their correct age either (that's vanity for you!). So be prepared to have slight discrepancies in ages in the earlier census records. Prior to the 1841 census records, there are records available, but generally these were taken in each parish and were only totals. Some parishes are now making these available online though, but it may not give you a great deal of help.
5......if you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer and on the page you are looking at their are literally thousand of entries that someone has typed in on the page, to save you scrolling down the page looking for your family name use the following to locate your names for you. Go to your top scroll bar, hit EDIT > then hit FIND ON THIS PAGE > and type in your family name then let your browser look for the names for you it will search through the whole page for you individually.

Below are the sites to use in your research. Although I cannot offer any look-up services for names, etc. I can offer help and advice if you are struggling to find where to start or perhaps have hit a brick wall as I have been researching family trees on the net for many years. I am not a professional and there are many others who have far more experience in this, but if I can offer any help please feel free to mail me and I will do the best I can to send you in the right direction.