Once upon a time those of us whose ancestors left the shores of England (to end up in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the former British colonies in Africa) had no hope of tracing their forbears, unless they were prepared to get involved in lengthy and expensive correspondence with professional genealogists, or spend precious vacation time in England doing the rounds of dusty records offices.

But all that has now changed! Thanks to the internet and its wonderful resources (sometimes even free resources) you can now begin to trace your English ancestry as soon as you finish reading this article. Here’s how to get started, in ten easy steps.

1. Harvest family memories

Ask your parents what they remember about their own parents: full names, dates of birth (even the approximate year might help), places of birth, where they lived, date or year of marriage, occupations, just about anything they can remember. Write it down. Better still, if your grandparents are still alive, write down their details, and ask them about their parents. You have eight great-grandparents (the parents of your four grandparents) and you are already starting to find out things about them that you never knew. And if some or all of your grandparents are dead, great aunt Flo and great uncle Fred are the same generation, and you can bet they are more than willing to spend an afternoon reminiscing. Try to find out from them roughly when your English ancestors first arrived in your country, and if possible, what their names were. Take these opportunities to borrow old family photos, no matter how dog-eared, and scan them into your computer.

2. Store your information digitally

Beautifully presented family history books are great for the scrapbooking and calligraphy fraternity, but what you really need is a user-friendly repository for all your bits and pieces right now, starting with a few random scraps of information. Most genealogy software lets you start with information about yourself – your full name, date of birth, &c. You then proceed to add details about your partner (if you have one), your children, your parents and your siblings. Then you can start to branch out, adding your parents’ parents, and so on. In theory you can add partners, children, parents or siblings for each new person in your tree, and so on ad infinitum. Your software will store all the information, work out the complexities of each person’s relationship to every other person, and allow you to print tree charts, box charts and text lists of your genealogy. They are generally very easy to use, and you can add and edit your information as it comes to hand . I use a shareware program called ‘Brother’s Keeper’ which you can download from here

http://www.bkwin.org

but there are many others out there. Just type ‘free genealogy software’ into your search engine and see what comes up.

3. Share your information online

Once you have a generation or two or three in your tree, it is a good idea to share this information with other amateur genealogists who may have some of the same people in their own tree. The genealogy software you use on your home computer (see Tip No. 2 above) will usually allow you to create something called a gedcom file. This is a file which sorts your information into a format which is able to be recognised by online genealogists whichever software is being used, allowing you to upload your information to sites such as the British-based ‘Genes Reunited’:

http://www.genesreunited.co.uk

Uploading your information to a site such as this protects your data against accidental loss. If your hard disk crashes and you forgot to do a back up, don’t worry. Your precious family tree is waiting to be retrieved from the internet. But the real point of putting it there is so that your potential distant cousins can contact you and share information. I have found people all over the world in this way, people with whom I share a common great-grandparent or great-great-grandparent, or GGG grandparent! Use your genealogy software to regularly update and upload your gedcom file (whenever you know that you have added a significant amount of new information to your tree).

A word of warning, however. It’s fantastic to find that you have a fourth cousin twice removed in a part of the world you had never even heard of, but just because she claims to have traced your common ancestry back to William the Conqueror it doesn’t mean that it’s true, or accurate, or well researched. So don’t swallow other peoples’ research wholesale: ask them nicely to quote their sources, and check them out if you can, before adding their discoveries to your own tree.

Genes Reunited allows users to contact each other without revealing e-mail addresses. It’s free to join, to upload your data and to respond to contact requests from fee-paying members. But if you want to initiate a contact yourself and view other members’ trees (with their permission) you will have to become a paying subscriber.

4. Access birth, marriage and death records, free of charge

This site will be your new best friend. Make a note of it now:

http://freebmd.rootsweb.com

The wonderful people at Free BMD are transcribing the entire Civil Registration index of births, marriages and deaths in England and Wales, and making the data available absolutely free online. Civil registration began in 1837, and so far the volunteer transcribers have completed almost 100% of the data from 1837 to 1929.

If you know your ancestor’s name, approximate year of birth, marriage or death, and have a rough idea about whereabouts in England the event occurred, you are on your way!. If you don’t know where in England they were born, married or died your task will be more difficult, but not impossible, especially if they have an unusual forename or surname. But if your ancestors had names like John Smith and Mary Smith, you are going to need more detailed information in order to track them down. You will probably be able to find this information in a census (Tips No. 5 and 8 below)

Once you have found your ancestor on Free BMD you will be given the name of the district in England in which the birth, marriage or death was registered, and a Volume Number and Page Number for the entry. Using this information you can order a copy of the certificate of the event from General Registry Office (see Tip No. 9 below). These copy certificates are going to give you lots of interesting information about your ancestors.

5. Use the website of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

For the sake of brevity I will refer to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by using the name by which it is commonly known, the Mormon Church.

Members of the Mormon Church need to trace their ancestors for religious reasons, which is why they have established a free website to enable people to trace their ancestors free of charge. Anyone can use the site, not just members of the Mormon Church. Here is the link to their search page:

http://www.familysearch.org

On this site you will have free access to the details of the 1881 English census – a big bonus – and to the Mormon Church’s International Genealogical Index (IGI). The IGI is a database created from many of the parish (church) registers of England going back many hundreds of years. This means that you can find out information about your ancestors’ baptisms, marriages and burials, and in some cases the names of their parents, in the centuries before the beginning of civil registration in 1837. Also, if you can find them in the 1881 census you can find out where they lived, their age in 1881 (thus allowing you to calculate their approximate year of birth), who lived in the same house (e.g. names of parents, children, siblings) and even their occupation.

Just fill in the search screen with your ancestor’s name, select an event type, a year and a year range, select a country (England) and click ‘Search’. The more detail you put in, and the narrower your year range (the maximum is +/- 20 years, i.e. 40 years), the fewer results you will get, but the more likely you are to find the John Smith that is your John Smith.

Here I issue the same word of warningas in Tip No. 3 above: treat any results from the ‘Ancestral File’ and the ‘Pedigree Resource File’ with caution. Whilst these sorts of results may be well-researched, sometimes they are just hopeful grabs at likely-sounding matches. Best stick to the IGI and the census, and regard the other results only as possible leads.

6. Get more information about England to use in your genealogical research

Did you know that England does not have states? The next level of government below the national government is local government, known as counties. The county governments are responsible for the registration of births, marriages and deaths. So it will be helpful to know which county your ancestors were born/married/died in, or lived in, when you begin to access registration or census information. Luckily there is a free website designed to help genealogists find their way around England online. Here it is:

http://www.genuki.org.uk

Here you will find a wealth of information about researching the British part of your family tree. I recommend that your read the ‘Getting started in genealogy’ and FAQ sections first. Then click on the ‘Enter this large collection….’ link. You can either browse amongst the information for the whole of the United Kingdom, or, if you already know which county you are interested in, click on ‘England’ and then your county of choice. You are more than likely to find many relevant online records and also links to local family history societies that may be able to assist you in your search.

7. Search for your ancestors’ surnames on Rootsweb

Rootsweb is a genealogy community website and forum hosted by the subscription website ancestry.com (see Tip No. 8 below).

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com

Like Genuki, it has guides to getting started in your search and links to free resources. Although it is primarily aimed at family history researchers based in the United States, it does have links to English resources. The main point of joining is to

• search its surnames list and family trees for the names you are interested in
• upload your tree or put your ancestors surnames and your contact details on the list

8. Subscribe to a fee-paying website to obtain census details

Although the Mormon Church website gives free access to the details of the 1881 English census, there were other censuses conducted every ten years starting in 1841, with the 1911 census being the most recent release. Although you can search the census indices on many websites free of charge, you will receive little information beyond the fact that the name you are looking for exists in the census, unless you are a paid subscriber. In my experience

http://www.ancestry.com

is good value because it gives you access to a great many other English records, such as parish records and the Pallotts Marriage Index, as well as census records.

But if you want access to the latest census release, the 1911 census, you will have to subscribe to

www.findmypast.com

The 1841 census gives little information beyond names, genders, ages and (approximate) addresses, but the quality of information improves with each census, and in later years you can expect to find full name, age, gender, relationship to head of household (wife, son, daughter, &c), occupation and place of birth for each individual in a household. You can look at not only a transcript of the census entries, but also an image of the original handwritten entries.

9. Order copies of birth, marriage and death certificates

Once you are fairly sure you have identified a particular ancestor, and a civil registration (birth/marriage/death) event which happened to them after the beginning of 1837, it’s time to order a certificate to confirm it. Unfortunately, this will cost money, but you are going to find out so much more about your ancestor from the certificate, as well as being able to cross check the details to make sure that this person really is your forebear. You may, for example, have found your ancestor’s year and place of birth in a census, found a matching record on Free BMD, and thus have details of the civil registration district and volume and page number for the certificate you are interested in. The next step is to order the certificate from the United Kingdom General Registry Office:

http://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/certificates

Provided you have the full details (name, year, district, volume, page) a certificate ordered online will be mailed to you at a lower cost than an application without all these details.

The information you can glean from the certificate will vary, with more recent certificates giving more information.

A birth certificate will tell you – full name, exact date of birth, mother’s name, and also father’s name if the parents were legally married. (It may also tell you the place of birth, the parents’ address and the father’s occupation.)

A marriage certificate will tell you – full names of both parties, exact date of marriage, place of marriage. (It may also tell you their dates of birth, occupations, addresses, fathers’ names and occupations, names of witnesses.)

A death certificate will tell you – full name, exact date of death. (It may also tell you place of death, cause of death, age at death, date of birth, address and occupation.)

10. Expand your online resources with Cyndi’s List

By now the Favourites tab on your web browser should be crammed with online resources you have discovered by following the links above. You may think you have covered most of the online resources available to you in your search for your English ancestry. Think again!

Cyndi Howells has compiled the most extensive list of genealogy sites on the internet. Find it at

http://www.cyndislist.com

This site is an absolute treasure trove for the aspiring online genealogist.

Happy browsing and good luck in your search!