Help for your own research.

You can help yourself in searching for your ancestors in many ways. Here follows some advice that I took when first starting out.

When you first start checking on your ancestors the best thing, by far is to speak to all your living relatives and friends of relatives who will know the names and possibly dates of persons not even known to you.
If you are living in the area where you are to search, nothing could be easier. Start to look around the local churchyards and ask at all the churches to look at the Birth, Marriage and Death records.
The local library is also a great place to start whether you are searching locally or if your ancestors were in another part of the country or the world.
One of the first records in the local library is the IGI the International Genealogy Index. This has been created on micro-fiche (400 milion baptisms and marriages created from parish records) and also CD-ROM (1000 million records) both of these by the Church of the Latter day saints (Mormons). Here you can view records of baptismal, marriage and death records that they have taken from church records all over the country.
There is also a vital records index of 5 million births, batptisms and marriages from 1538 to 1891 and the National Burials index for England and Wales (over 5 million records) all of these are on CD Rom.
On the Internet you can also obtain information from the IGI by visiting their site http://www.familysearch.com. If you just enter your full name into the search window of any search engine, particularly www.google.com you will be surprised what comes out!! If you cannot find what you want on the net I am only an email away and willing to help

You can obtain details of all the necessary census returns from either the Family Records Centre in Myddleton Street London or from your local records office. The 1851 census (Limited to 3 counties) and the 1881 census covering the whole of UK are available. It is usually much easier to get the records of a county from the local county records office. Most counties have very good census records and parish indexes.

Look through Kellys and Pigots directories for your area and these will give details of residents of local towns and tradesmen for the 18th and 19th centuries.

Remember, not everyone recorded the birth, marriage or even death and every record you can find is valuable.

To search in the UK a useful site is www.origins.net and the Scottish link www.origins.net/GRO which covers the General Record Offices for England and Scotland. You will have to pay for searching here but it is not expensive unless you want printed copies of certificates.

Check on Army lists and the names of soldiers who died in the great war and the 1939-45 conflict.

In most libraries there are the wills indexes and copies of local papers going back over the last two centuries.

Remember to check all details from whichever source for dates, content and factual authenticity.

Details from relatives may not always be factual but they are remembered exactly how they believe them to be. Even your own direct relatives, Mother, Father, Grandmother etc., will have facts slightly out of synch. "Facts" handed down without written confirmation are always difficult to reconcile with other facts that you come across.
Very often, 'memories' are what I call, borrowed memories. These are stories passed down when you are young and you grow up with these, 'memories' that you often think of your own memories but they are clouded by time. Check everything, if you are going back to your ancestors.

Photographs of family members and their friends are very important to a properly researched ancestral tree. Make sure that you know who the people in the photograph are and any dates, places that can link to the photo's are an invaluable help in research.
Certificates are obviously the most important aid to your research. Scottish certificates of birth, for instance, give not only the mother's and father's names but also their date and place of marriage and the mothers maiden name.
These facts alone can get you to the marriage certificate and then you have both the grandparents names. Each time you obtain a certificate you are a couple of steps forward - or backward, whichever way you look at research into your ancestors.

You can decide whether to limit yourself to one name studies (Only tracing your own family name for instance) and this can lead to a worldwide study as, in this case, you should record all instances of the name. Fine if you have a name such as Fitz-Cholmondley and not too difficult but the other end of the spectrum and you come up with an impossible task with names such as Brown, Smith, Williams etc.

More likely you will content yourself with your own immediate family and perhaps direct links, in each case, with the female line. This can lead to some interesting studies as you then come up against the maximum amount of movement of the families and travel within the country and even travels abroad.
My own studies have already taken in most of the continents of the World and I am in communication with people who have links, however tenuous, with my family.