Ancestry websites

There was an interesting review in yesterday's Guardian of family history web sites.

Personally, I think ancestry.co.uk is indeed the best one out of all that I have tried. I have found loads of information on it.

Another good one is onefamilytree.com. This one not only gives you info on individuals (e.g. their birth info) but it also gives you stuff on some of their ancestors. e.g. not only them but their parents and grandparents names, which helps in building family trees, of course.

Having just got back from Australia, I have a bit more info to add to my family history site. Hope to do this in the next few weeks as things return to normal at home.

You can't do it all on the Internet.........

but you can do a hell of a lot of it!

You can't do it all on the Internet - the message we were given when we attended the free talk about family research a couple of weeks ago at the Family Records Centre.

Well, all I can say is that so far I have done almost all my research exactly through that channel.

Through a combination of web sites (small, large, free to use and via trial subscriptions), email and mailing lists, I have probably tripled the amount of information I had when I began this project.

Here are some of the web sites I have found particularly useful:

NSW Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages I would have been facing an impossible task researching my NSW ancestors had it not been for this excellent web site. Good to see the NSW Govt putting tax payer's money to good use, for a change. Lists all births, deaths and marriages registered in NSW since 1788 (excluding recent stuff.)

Free BMD Another gem for family researchers. Allows you to search for births, deaths and marriages registered in England and Wales since 1837.

Ancestry.co.uk Available only via subscription but really good for searching through UK census information. Register for a 14 day free trial and use it as much as possible!

Claim a Convict The place to go to not only check if your ancestor was possibly a convict, but also to find other people who are claiming them. Through this site I have made a number of good contacts, including one or two new friends.

Granted, the information I have been looking for is relatively "recent" in genealogy terms: 1800's and later. Once I get back further, looking into births in the 1700s is probably going to require visits to places like Shropshire and so on, digging through dusty old church and parish records.

You might not be able to do ALL of your research on the internet, but you can make pretty good inroads.

Ya gotta have a plan

My day job involves project management and like any good project manager knows, if you want to achieve something, it helps to have a plan.

So the first thing I did was to make a plan of how I was going to research my family history - and here it is:

• Get some software to hold my family history information as I gathered it
• I found a great shareware program called GenoPro

• Create a web site to populate with information as I found it (so I can share it)
• I used some of my server space at funnelweb
  

• Work out what I already knew
• Most of this was about the Perrys and the Walls
  
• I reviewed all the information I "inherited" from my grandmother, compared it with the information on Dennis' website and discounted some of it as things just didn't fit

• Work out what I needed to find out and where I needed to look
  
• The ongoing bit
  

The last step is where I am at now. It may never end - how far back I go will probably depend on how much time I want to spend digging into records which naturally will get more difficult to find (if they exist at all), the further back in time I go.

But at least I have a plan.