by Sass Greenwood

Created on: June 24, 2009

One of the great benefits of the Internet is that of having masses of information at your fingertips, without having to spend a great deal of energy in locating it.

Family history has always been seen as a hobby that takes up a lot of time and money - visits to archives, parishes, museums, birthplaces... it never seemed the ideal hobby to take up if you worked 39 hours a week and had living family members to look after.

Fortunately, the variety of resources available online enable you to find out a great deal about your ancestors, all without leaving the comfort of your own home. There's still expenditure involved - most genealogy sites charge a monthly, yearly or pay-as-you-go fee, and it will cost you once you start buying copies of certificates.

With this in mind, it's important to find out as much as you can about an ancestor before ordering a birth, marriage or death certificate - many people shared their name with quite a few others in their area, so ending up with details on someone else's great-great grandmother could prove to be a costly mistake.

The following websites have helped me immensely on my journey into researching my family tree, and are good, user-friendly places to start on your genealogical journey (as I'm reviewing ones that I have personally used, there is a UK bias here).

Ancestry.com/.co.uk

I started using this site back in 2005, and since then more and more records have been added to make Ancestry a real hub of information.

Billions of entries are available to search, including every UK census up until 1901, births, marriages, deaths, immigration, emigration and military records.

When searching, try and enter as much information as possible. If you cannot find the person you're looking for, try variants of names (many wrote down abbreviated versions and first initials, and in some cases names and dates have been transcribed incorrectly as the original handwriting on census records can be quite hard to read). Also try widening the date range for an event, and try the names of places nearby.

Once you have enough information to start a tree, you can enter it on Ancestry, and the site will look at your information and search the records for it. If it finds what it thinks is a match, it will bring up a little leaf or 'hint' by the person's name, which you can click on to ascertain if the suggested record is correct. This has been a really helpful way for me to grow my tree quickly, but just make sure you double check that the

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