Internet Research

You’ll be amazed to find how many records exist about your ancestors and how many of them you can access from the comfort of your living room via the internet. There are many useful website where you can access useful resources, such as census records, baptisms, some military records, or passenger lists. Some of the services you have to pay for but many of them are free to search and even access the records.

ANCESTRY

Once you've collected enough information from your relatives, the easiest way to start your internet family research is to subscribe to Ancestry. You can pay monthly or yearly, but if you are put off by the prices you can use the offer of 14 days free trial, during which you can gather all the initial information needed to start you out and then you can decide whether it is worth subscribing for a longer period.

There are many databases on Ancestry but most importantly it contains all the census records dating back to 1841. The 1901 census is the one you will need to look through first. If your grandparents or great grandparent were not born before 1901 and you have no idea where your family comes from, you'll have to first request the birth certificate of your oldest known relative to be able to identify the family of your ancestors in the 1901 census. Once you have located the family (make sure there isn't another one which fits your description), you can easily trace them through the censuses back to 1841.

If nothing comes up in a search and the family looks like they disappeared for that year try not to be too specific with your searches. Try to use wildcards, such as * and ?. Putting C* in the first name box will show all people with first name starting with C or putting it at the end of a surname, such as Lakin* will find all its variants, such as Lakin, Lakins, Lakings etc. The name could have been transcribed wrongly into the database so try searching for all people of similar age in the town. Don't forget that the information in the census is based on what the family told the enumerator and if they wanted to call themselves different name they could. Similarly, places of birth were often made up and ages didn't reflect reality.

Another great feature of Ancestry is its Family Trees section. Members have been submitting their family tree information to Ancestry for years and so it is possible that someone has already researched what you are looking for. Connecting with fellow researchers is always good because comparing and confirming information is invalueable.

FAMILYSEARCH.ORG

Familysearch.org is a website run by the Church of Letter Day Saints which has many useful resources. For a start it has free access to 1881 census. Although you can't see the original images it has the useful feature of browsing through particular location by neighbouring households. You can go through the whole village or town looking at who lived next door to whom. This can be useful when establishing the extended family of your ancestors.

Another great free resource on familysearch.org is the International Genealogical Index (IGI). The IGI was created by the LDS Church and it is certainly the most comprehensive available index of English parish baptisms and marriages available. (Burials are not in the index, except for a few isolated examples). It is far from complete, however, it is a great genealogical tool.

When searching IGI through the LDS website you can only specify a county and not the actual parish so if your surname of interest is a common one you'll end up with lots of results to go through. There is a great website which lists the IGI records by counties and parishes so you can search the particular parishes of interest. Sometimes it is worth checking back with LDS website as additional entries for the parish might be found.

FREEBMD

Once you've got a few families in your tree and you established from which area they are from, it's good to visit freebmd website. Freebmd offers free searches of the GRO (General Records Office) index to birth, marriages and deaths. Registration started in England in 1837 and the freebmd project which is run by volunteers usually lists births, deaths and marriages up to about 1915. It is not fully complete yet but many of the years have 99% of the records. With the index you find you can then order the certificate from the GRO website.

Even if you don't intend to order certificates freebmd is a great researcher's tool. If you know the approximate date of birth of your ancestor from the census and the registration district or the county where he/ she was born then you can try to find their birth certificate index. After 1912 the index lists also the mother's maiden name so you can confirm children that belong to your families. Depending on how common your surname of interest is, you can try to search for surname in the registration district your ancestors were from and try to find out whether some of the children belong to your research.

Searching through marriage certificates adds further functionality - when you click on the page number of the result you get the list of people on the same page, which means that one of them is the one your ancestor married. There usually are two couples per page so you have fifty fifty chance. If you know from the census the first name of the spouse you can then confirm her maiden name.

After 1860 death certificate indexes also give the age when the person died, a great way of confirming it is your ancestor.

Freebmd has two sister projects Freecen and Freereg, both of which are at its early stages. Freecen is an attempt to transcribe all census records. Gloucestershire is not covered very well, only about 7,000 individuals are transcribed so far (about 1%) from 1891 census. Freereg then offers a small sample of parish register records.

Other useful websites for family research include Familyhistoryonline.net which holds National Burial Index database where you could find when your ancestors were buried. Findmypast.com has 1841, 1861, 1881 and 1891 censi, GRO indexes and some additional databases, such as Passenger Lists Leaving UK 1890-1960 which can be useful if your ancestors left Britain for Canada, US or Australia. Both these websites work on pay per view basis (findmypast also offers subscriptions)

FORUMS & MESSAGE BOARDS

Internet makes it possible to connect with people from all over the world and when researching your family history that can be a great boon. The best way to find more information about your ancestors, especially when you are stuck with your research is to put a message on a message board. Large genealogy websites such as Ancestry or Genealogy.com have their own message boards and they are usually free to search through. B-G Forum is a large forum covering all aspects of genealogy and its counties forum provides a great way of connecting with fellow researchers. Another great forum is Rootschat.com.

Another great way of sharing your genealogical problems is joining Rootsweb mailing list. There are many different topics covered by different mailing lists. It's good to join the mailing list for the particular county or surname of interest. You will always find someone who will be able to help you whether it is a look up or just a general answer to your questions. All emails sent to the lists are archived and you can search through them. Some of the lists date back to the late 1990s so if anybody on the list had ever researched your ancestors a few years back you can find them.

To join the GLOUCESTER Mailing List, which is a list for Gloucestershire genealogy, send an e-mail to the list-format of your choice, with the command subscribe in the body of the message.

GLOUCESTER-d-request@rootsweb.com (for the digest format), or
GLOUCESTER-l-request@rootsweb.com (for the individual-message format)