My search for my ancestors

My ancestors were born and lived in many parts of Britain. One branch of the family has lived in the same town for over 400 years whilst remainder have travelled widely throughout Britain in seach of a better life. Many were very poor, with a life no one would envy and a few were quite wealthy. Nearly all had, by modern British standards, large families.

One of the things I learnt early on is to concentrate on direct relatives, that is not to worry too much about distant cousins, otherwise the family tree just gets too complicated. More distant relatives details can be useful when using Family History sites trying to link to other people searching for other family branches on sites like GenesReunited though. I am now starting to look at more distant ancestors now, but only because I have got the basics completed.

I started searching for the origins of mu ancestors using birth, marriage and death records kept in dusty old books at the British Govenment's Public Records Office in London. This is now, sadly, closing.

Census returns were on Microfiche, a kind of miniture photographic film, which required a special viewer to use. This gave me a real feeling of history but was very time consuming and, although using the records was free, expensive in travel costs.

The Public records Office did give free access access to the LDS family history database online and also basic records from Ancestry.co.uk . These internet sources were not a well developed as they are now but I quickly found that this was the quickest way to search for likely family members.

Read more about my search and how I started Searching for my ancestors