Trace your family history. (Geneology)

Member Name: janharper

Product:	Geneology
Date:	07/10/00 (298 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Interesting use of the web

Disadvantages: akes lots of time and maybe you don't want to know!

Tracing your family history can be interesting and sometimes quite suprising. My ancestors were horned Viking Warriors who pillaged the east coast of England!

I found this and lots of other quite startling family secrets by searching the web. Its a good idea to put your surname into a good search engine and see what it throws up when youfirst start.You do need to get down to searching out records, certificates, etc if you want a precise family tree with dates but you could also make a study of your family name.

The Latter Day Saints (LDS.com) have a website where you can access lots of information on births, deaths, marriages, etc. Its very incomplete but you mioght find some clues here. They also have CD's for sale which cover different regions. I've no idea why they should want to collect such data, but its there.

There are a number of different government records offices that you can get access to. Records for England and Wales are kept together but Scotland and Northern Ireland have seperate arrangements.

The main source for geneological sources in UK is the Family Records Centre which is run by the General Records Office and the Public Records Office. This is London based and keeps details of marriages, births and deaths in England since 1837. It also keeps indexes of legal adoptions since 1927.

There are other non-governmental resources.

http://www.freebmd.rootsweb.com
Volunteers are putting GRO indexes onto the web here.

http://www.freereg.rootsweb.com
The idea here is to provide free net searches for baptism, marriages and burials which have been collected from Parish and non-conformist church records. (Not operational yet but coming.)

The main government resources can be found on the web:

Family Records Centre
http://www.familyrecords.gov.uk/frc.htm

Public Records Office
http://www.pro.gov.uk

There should be enough information here f
or anyone to make a start. Write down what you know and then start your detective work.

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