www.familytreetalk.co.uk
The place to talk about and get help tracking down your family history, or help others.
Indispensable Links
Links to indispensable web sites, some that will cost but many that are for free
Federation of Family History Societies
Parish Finder - UK Parish Database
Catalogues of archives held throughout England
United Kingdom Census
A census has been taken every ten years since 1801 (apart from 1941) but generally names were only recorded from 1841 on. Censuses for 1841 to 1911 available online now.
Starting places
FreeCEN Free site with transcriptions from volunteers
Ancestry Ancestry site
Findmypast FindMyPast site
The Genealogist The Genealogist site
Family search This is the LDS site with a free fully searchable transcription of the UK 1881 census
Genes Reunited Genes Reunited site
Scotland's People Scotlands People site
More Information
National Archives Research Guide
England & Wales Births, Marriages and Deaths Registration
Registration of Births, Marriages and Deaths - BMD - started in July 1837 in England and Wales. The indexes are available on line but you have to pay to obtain a paper certificate.
Starting places
FreeBMD Free site with transcriptions of BMD indexes for England and Wales
GRO Certificate Ordering official website for ordering certifs once you have found the person in the index. Avoid other sites that offer to get certificates for a lot more money for little extra.
More Information
The details recorded for marriages were the same in the parish registers as on the wedding certificate so for example if you're looking for a marriage in London during the 1800s or early 1900s its worth looking at Ancestry because they've put the parish registers from LMA (the London Metropolitan Archives) on line so if your relatives got married in a church you can see all the details there and you won't need to buy a copy of their wedding certificate from the GRO.
Newspapers
Starting places
Old newspapers are a very good source for tracking down information about your ancestors. It helps if they are famous, did something notable or the opposite, fell foul of the justice system or got involved in bankruptcy but its surprising what turns up.
The London, Edinburgh and Belfast Gazette - complete archive from 1752, including Honours and Awards, bankruptcies, and complete coverage of the World Wars. Free.
British Newspapers 1800-1900 - over two million pages of 19th and early 20th century newspapers from 49 British national and regional titles. Subscription service but available for free in many UK public libraries and many offer access from home for members, see below for details.
The Times Digital Archive 1785-1985 - complete searchable archive. Subscription based service but again available for free in many UK public libraries and many offer access from home for members.
Guardian and Observer Digital Archive - the archive will eventually contain the digital reproduction of every page, article and advert published in the Guardian (since 1821) and the Observer (since 1791). Currently covers up to 1990 for boith newspapers with work in progress to extend this to 2003. Searching is free but you need to pay to view in full (although free access to the Guardian and Observer Digital Archive is offered by some libraries, see below)
Google News Archive - free searchable newpaper archive, strong on Australia and US
National Library of Australia - Australian newspapers from 1831 (not complete, work in progress), also free.
British Newspaper Archive - launched in December 2011, a collaboration between the British Library and Brightsolid (owners of Findmypast and Genes Reunited) to digitize the roughly 40 million pages in the British Library collection. You can search for free and see a snippet of text when a match is found but it's chargeable to see the full article or newspaper page. In some case the snippet will give you all you want although you may still need to view the image of the newspaper article where the quality of the text using automatic OCR (optical character reading) techniques is not up to producing an accuarate transcription.
More Information
Many libraries allow you to access from home the British Newspapers 1800-1900 and/or the Times Archive websites - all you need is a library card although to get this you do need to live or work within the local library area.
Areas that do this include:
Barnet
• Barnsley
• Bath and North East Somerset
• Bedford
• Birmingham
• Bournemouth
• Bracknell Forest
• Bradford
• Bristol
• Bromley
• Cambridgeshire
• Cheshire East
• Cheshire West and Chester
• Cornwall
• Cumbria
• Derby
• Derbyshire
• Devon
• Dorset
• Ealing
• East Sussex
• Essex
• Gloucestershire
• Hampshire
• Herefordshire
• Hertfordshire
• Hillingdon
• Kent
• Lancashire
• Leeds
• Lincolnshire
• Liverpool
• Manchester
• Newcastle upon Tyne
• Norfolk
• Northamptonshire
• Nottinghamshire
• Oxfordshire
• Reading
• Slough
• Somerset
• South Gloucestershire
• Surrey
• Swindon
• Telford and Wrekin
• Vale of Glamorgan (Bro Morgannwg)
• West Sussex
• Wiltshire
Note that anyone resident in the UK can join Lancashire Libraries or Manchester Libraries, see their web sites for more details.
Online access via libraries to the Guardian/Observer newspaper archive is less common but it is provided by the following libraries:
Cambridgeshire
• Cornwall
• Derbyshire
• Essex
• South Gloucestershire
• Manchester
• Northamptonshire
Note that you can join Cambridgeshire Library via an online form if you live, work or study in Essex, Hertfordshire, Suffolk, Norfolk, Peterborough, Bedfordshire, Lincolnshire or Northamptonshire as well as in Cambridgeshire. Also anyone resident in the UK can join Manchester Libraries, see their web site for more details.
Maps
Directories, Trade Directories, Phone Books
Free searchable English local and trade directories
Not Yet Categorized
Locating London's Past - lets you to search a wide body of digital resources relating to early modern and eighteenth-century London, and to map the results on a 1746 map.
Palaeography guide from the National Archives website
Latin tutorial from the National Archives website
New South Wales shipping Lists - online scans of the passenger lists from arriving ships 1828 to 1896
The War Graves Photographic Project - The aim of The War Graves Photographic Project was to photograph every war grave, individual memorial, covering all nationalities and military conflicts and make these available within a searchable database.