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 information is correct.
Ancestry can also find your relatives if they are in another member's tree - so if they already have plenty of ancestors listed, you can add them all to your tree too!
You can search the records for free, but you have to pay to see census transcriptions and original documents.
Findmypast.com
This site is a lot like Ancestry, with the option to create your family tree online, and search various records. The new 1911 census is also available to search from this site, which is useful for finding out more about grandparents and great-grandparents.
This census gives extra information too, such as how many years a couple had been married for at the time, and how many children they had in total, including ones that died, lived away from the home or were from a previous marriage.
Findmypast also gives you the opportunity to search for living relatives, via the electoral roll and lists of telephone data.
Like Ancestry, Findmypast offers a choice between monthly subscriptions, or buying pay-as-you-view credits.
Freebmd.org.uk
If you're purely after getting your hands on copies of certificates, then check here to get the information you need for free. You'll also find links to FreeCEN (English census returns) and FreeREG (parish registers).
Bear in mind when searching that the records are not yet 100% complete, so you may not be successful. However, most of the Birth, Marriage and Death records for the UK have now been transcribed, so at the moment this is likely to be much more useful than FreeCEN and FreeREG.
Genuki.org.uk
More free information, displayed by breaking the UK down into individual towns and parishes. Find out a little more about the places your ancestors came from, and see if you can find them in the trade directories.
These are just a few of the many sites out there that can help you to research your family history. You may find as you go further back that you need to make a few trips out, as it's harder to locate ancestors online before the advent of Civil Registration and census records.
Don't underestimate the power of harassing older relatives either - once you get them reminiscing, they can unknowingly throw up a lot of useful tidbits.