David Lock

For months the Mrs has been going on about researching her family history. Not helped by some TV series she has been watching. So I promised to investigate where she should start and made the mistake of looking at Google for help

Information on sites overload so can anyone give us a good starting point - you know birth records, military records etc. The Mrs is not a super computer person so it needs to be fairly straightforward to use and I appreciate we may have to pay a small fee to access some sites.

Genes Reunited seems to have a big market share but if anyone has knowledge of other decent starting places please post.

Thanks, David

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JackClark

Visit Genes Reunited and Ancestry.co.uk they all list the databases they have. I sometimes check into the forum on Ancestry.co.uk quite interesting.

gallois

The most important thing of all before you start to spend money on 1811 census records, or army records, birth death certs etc, is to speak to all the oldest people in the family, get as much info as you can especially addresses, occupations and dates of births of grand parents and great grandparents otherwise you'll hit a dead end pretty quickly.

i use Genes reunited, there's links on the site to check census records, and a tree builder.

i've got stuck at around 1850 on my dads line, complete dead end, no grandparents left alive, so not much else to do.

mrs_b4

I did a lot of research a few years ago I used ancestry.com you will end up paying a fee it used to be about £20 a month but that did cover all of this country immigration records and military records too,I started with my grandfathers year of birth and discovered over a thousand relatives,it is quite time consuming and you may want to purchase a family tree maker to keep all the records of stuff you find plus it often ends up costing money to authenticate your findings ie birth marriage and death certificates,that said I found the whole thing really interesting.

Chip

My father was doing this before he died a few years ago and it was amazing how much info was out there on our family. He went up to London as well and searched through the stuff in the records office.

We also discovered an old family bible as well which I now have and am going to get restored to as near to original condition as I can.

Chip

David Lock

Thanks peeps - looks like we'll make a start along lines suggested. One problem is we literally do not have any relatives left to ask. I did ask my old mum and f-i-l to scribble some family history down but no real response and they're both gone now. We do know that Diana's dad and his many brothers were all Freemen of Gloucester for some reason (?) so that might be a starting point. My dad bailed out when I was six months old so he's not much help

Wish me luck

David

oldsplice

Ancestry.co.uk, and FreeBMD.co.uk (which also has free census and free parish registers for some areas. Also this site is good........has forums and you can ask people to do look-ups for you... http://www.british-genealogy.com/

As said earlier, get as much info as poss from living relatives. I've been doing mine for about 20 years now. Back to 1665 on my dad's direct line.

oldsplice

If you get your parents marriage cert, it will have both their fathers on it, and their occupation.