Genealogy Chat

If you have relatives on the 1901 census you should be able to pick the family up again on the 1881 census which is free to search on familysearch.org or familyhistoryonline. You can find other census on ancestry with images but you have to pay. They usually offer a free fortnight's trial so you can see if you like the site.

nudge for a newby

Matthew The first point in genealogy/family history is to start with yourself and go BACkWARDS. Make sure you have your birth cert which gives your parents names and then go after your parents marriage certificate which will give their parents names and so on. Then you get your parents birth certs. At that point you can decide whether you go after both mother and father lines or one or the other. Doing it this way there is less likelihood of making mistakes although if you have too many John Smith you might have a problem! Many people do both so that when they hit a brick wall on one line they can move to another line. The further back you go the more lines. When you get back to 1901 you then use birth/marriage certs in conjunction with the census back to 1841. This is the last census to be able to get your folks back to a county pre 1837 when you are then into record offices for which there is at least one for every county. Janet

Look on the local reg office site where they were born.You can order through them.If the family are in your home town you can go into the office to get them

Mathew, You are about to become seriously addicted to family history, but its not to late to walk away! Seriously welcome to this compulsive hobby. If you want to search online then Freebmd.rootsweb.*com/cgi/search has a growing index of births deaths and marriages from 1837 to about 1911 but not complete yet. www.1837online.*com is the 'official' General Register Office site so is more or less complete but is pay to view. If you can get to the Family Records Centre in Myddleton Street London you can look through the index books yourself, or most county records offices and some big libraries have at least part of the indexes on microfiche. Some counties also have their own index of local events. Having found the right entry you can then order certificates online via the 1837 site or contact the registrar in the district where the event was registered by post. Either way the certificates cost £7 Good hunting Judith (remove the * when using the addresses)

you're best looking on http://freebmd.rootsweb(.)com/cgi/search.pl for a possible match then note down the vol & page number besides it so you can send off for a certifacte

I've traced various members of my family on the 1901 census and apart from this know little about them, what is the easiest way to obtain marriage / death certificates if all i've got to go on is a name or year of birth? Thanks for any tips Mathew