Researching your heritage

[better dead than red]

You also might try familysearch.org. It is free, you just need to set up an account.

It's run by the Mormon Church and, for religious reasons,they are heavily into genealogy.

 

[sir baconface]

Ancestry or find my past. Mum runs an genealogy business and uses those two sites as well as search bmd and archives in person.

You also might try familysearch.org. It is free, you just need to set up an account.

It's run by the Mormon Church and, for religious reasons,they are heavily into genealogy.

Thanks to both of you.

 

[Ghandi's Flip Flops]

You also might try familysearch.org. It is free, you just need to set up an account.

It's run by the Mormon Church and, for religious reasons,they are heavily into genealogy.

Family search can be pretty good for certain things, especially access to quite a few online cemetery records for free.

Oh, it also tends to help if your family weren't Catholic. There's a lot more C of E records available for free or via Ancestry or FMP subscription.
The Catholic church seem to keep a tighter rein on their records for some reason, and charge 'nominal fees' for searches or information

 

[better dead than red]

Thanks to both of you.

Anytime, mate. Here's another site you may find interesting and hopefully useful.

https://www.findagrave.com

 

[BigBluey]

I used Ancestry. Com to carry out my fathers family tree and he funded it.

The good thing about Ancestry is that you get "hints" from others who may share a distant relative and it allows you to verify that information with your own research.

I managed to back to 1500 hundreds with mine and received such a "hint" and it turned out to be an American who shared a relative. He had paid a professional to do his tree which went back to Norman times.

It turns out we have French relatives.
My dad then wanted to confirm some of the findings via a DNA Test.

Turns out that 30% of his blood is French/Western European. 60% British and 10% Scandanavian!!

 

[halfcenturyup]

If you know about your recent ancestors and want to see what you can find out about earlier stuff, you could try freebmd.org.uk which can be useful for finding births, marriages.and deaths back to 1837. Not as good as Ancestry, but it's free so you can start for nothing. Familysearch.org is free too and if you are from Lancashire, there are parish records online from www.lan-opc.org.uk which is also free.

Don't waste money on a subscription site until you have to, would be my advice.

 

[sir baconface]

If you know about your recent ancestors and want to see what you can find out about earlier stuff, you could try freebmd.org.uk which can be useful for finding births, marriages.and deaths back to 1837. Not as good as Ancestry, but it's free so you can start for nothing. Familysearch.org is free too and if you are from Lancashire, there are parish records online from www.lan-opc.org.uk which is also free.

Don't waste money on a subscription site until you have to, would be my advice.

Sounds good advice but I couldn't even find my own birth on BMD! Thanks anyway.

 

[halfcenturyup]

Sounds good advice but I couldn't even find my own birth on BMD! Thanks anyway.

IIRC freebmd is only indexed up to the mid-1970s, so if you were born before that you should be OK. If not, I suppose you know who your parents and grandparents were - you can start with them.

 

[Ghandi's Flip Flops]

Don't waste money on a subscription site until you have to, would be my advice.

Usually i would tend to agree, but in the case of Ancestry a subscription (for a month) would be money would be well spent in my view. There's loads of records on there plus it gives you an idea of what types of records are available and it's a useful tool in compiling your family tree.

Where as other subscription sites say like Forces War Records etc the vast majority of people will find that a lot of info on there pertinent to themselves, they could access it for free from other sources, find it via internet searches or find the same info (plus more) via an Ancestry subscription.

The other thing with paying sites is they tend to also have a credit system, where you buy credits and each bit of info you access costs a certain amount of credits. This can be a really expensive system if you're looking at doing a full family tree (compared to a full subscription), and should only really be used for getting specific info and you know exactly what you are looking for.

 

[Dave S]

I researched my family tree years ago, and we'll before there was anything on-line. For six years I traipsed from one local studies library to another, County record offices and even cemeteries here there and everywhere. Despite all that however, it is a fascinating hobby and totally absorbing. One of the most interesting things I have ever done.