Best *free* online genealogy source?

As an experienced family historian, having used many genealogy websites I believe that they are all good in their own way; for instance ancestry.co.uk is a well known and quite popular genealogy website, it is great for displaying and creating family trees and other related infomation ie. births, marriages. I recommend this website as being used mainly for that.

However another place is findmypast.co.uk - pheraphs less known but not necessary for good reason, they often give you offers that no other family history websites give you, free credits. With these you can search there database of records and find information to piece together you tree, but their tree builder isn't as good as ancestry's. When these offers arise (which is fairly often) you can expect to get around 50 credits each time or so which gets you about twenty birth records, so not bad.

Finally there is genesreunited.co.uk - arguably the most popular genealogy website out there, and one of the oldest. They specialise in connecting with other members (for free) and looking up living relatives also using genes reunited.

As you can see they each vary and are uniquely different, that's why I use each of them to get the best genealogy experience. I also think familysearch.org is great although it has slightly less records than the others.

Most of what you are looking for is in records you already have at home and those are what you need to check first before you go online...... this willhelp you do that http://familytimeline.webs.com/recordsinyourownhom... you are very lucky in the UK as FH societies have been working for years transcribing indexes and many of them are free, those that don't know think they need to pay subscriptions to websites to see them and do waste their money simply as they don't know or want everything together on one website....... but websites are not how you research, you only use them as a clue about where to look for real records as you need to prove, so you need to check or you will not have your ancestors in your tree.. the links page will give you lots of those British links and they are also adding lots of transcriptions which are on the documents page under each county........

Your local records office, free, you just need to get CARN card, again free just take ID plus a utility bill with you the first time, PENCIL and notebook and some change for any copies of records you want... GENUKI is a good start to fin what records are available for each county and town/village and where they are .... rootschat, family tree forum, join the forums again free and you will have access to some very knowledgeable local family historians who will help you and who often have their own resources and /or will check weekly their local records office for records and will send PM you a copy.....

Just remember if it is not an image online it is not a record and if it is not a record it is just a clue, all the things I have mentioned are on the links page

Hello Kathy,

There are a few free genealogy sites available on the Internet.

Two of the better ones are Family Search and Free BMD

The links to these are:

https://familysearch.org/

http://www.freebmd.org.uk/

However they are a little limited in what you can discover.

It does not make any real difference whether you choose to use a British based site or US one as virtually all cater for all countries, for example one of the best paying sites is Ancestry.com which is based in the US. Find My Past is another excellent paying site but is UK based.

On both of the above sites you can have a 14 day free trial and I would recommend you take advantage of the free trials in order to get used to the way you look for your ancestors.

If you use their free trials and decide not to continue make sure you cancel this before the due payment date or you could find a considerable amount of money has been taken from your bank account.

The lowest amount you can pay on Find My Past is £49.95 for a years subscription.

Good luck and happy ancestor hunting.

Poseidon

I'd have to say

https://familysearch.org/search

No longer the largely user-submitted website it used to be, it now includes actual images of real documents (censuses, parish records etc) which are often free to view (although some of them are pay-to-view via a partnership with FindMyPast)

Also, http://www.freebmd.org.uk/cgi/search.pl

Allows you to view the index of GRO births, marriages and deaths, but you have to order the actual certificates (at about 10 quid a pop!) if you want the full info. You can often deduce a lot from the index entry, though (e.g. more modern births have the mother's maiden name listed in the index and as there are normally only two or three couples per page in the marriage index, if you know the woman's given name, you can often deduce her maiden surname from the marriage entry). But, like most transcribed resources, it's full of transcription errors.

Also, check if there's an Online Parish Clerk for the parishes where your ancestors come from. Cornwall has a fantastic OPC scheme, with a website with a searchable database: http://www.cornwall-opc-database.org/

But many other places have OPC schemes where you can e-mail someone and they will look up entries in the local parish records. Just google the name of the place you're interested in and "online parish clerk"

You can sometimes find useful stuff on the National Archives website:

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/

Finally, there's Rootschat: http://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php

This is a genealogy messageboard where people are often quite willing to do look-ups if requested in the "Look-up request" section under the relevant county. They also have a section under each county where free online resources are listed.

One of my favourite pay-per-view resources is the British Newspaper Archive:

http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/

Although you have to pay to view the articles, you can search for free. If you are in or near London, it's even better to visit the British Newspaper Library in person. You have to buy a day pass to use it, but I found loads when I was there (local newspaper articles often provide more details on births, marriages and deaths than a BMD certificate would and I've found newspapers particularly useful for researching more recent relations, who haven't yet shown up in the publicly released censuses)

Also, if you're in London, the National Archives in Kew is free to use and the Society of Genealogists' Library, although not free (you have to pay a fairly hefty fee for a day ticket) has loads of useful resources. http://www.sog.org.uk/

BTW, if you want to use Ancestry without paying, local libraries often have a subscription, so you can use it free if you are on the library premises.

If you want to see other people's family trees and contact people who are researching the same family as you, the following sites (unlike GenesReunited) are free to use:

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/

http://www.mundia.com/gb/

Just remember that what they've posted is not necessarily right - amateur genealogists often make mistakes and it's a bad idea to copy and paste someone else's research as if it's the gospel truth without checking their sources.

Good luck!