Making a Family Tree

[Glenn1950]

Hi My name is glenn and I live in Australia, I migrated with my parents in 1966 from the UK. I am in the process of putting together a family tree and would appreciative nay help. I have started a "Mactree" and have joined "Ancestry".
My searches have started with my parents families were all in Derby and Nottingham. Fathers name is Woodward and his parents lived in Derby, mother family is Wright and came from around Spondon,Draycott.

Appreciate any help

Cheers
Glenn

[christanel]

Welcome to the British-Genealogy forums Glenn.
To get some help from our friendly and knowledgeable people may I suggest you pick the county forum which suits each family you are needing help with, post all the information you have and know to be factual then tell us what help you are needing. Family stories can be helpful if you have any of those you can tell, but they can also be misleading and in genealogy we always work back from ourselves, parents, grandparents and so on. It may be and is usually true to say that at some point birth, marriage and death certificates have to be purchased to prevent us going down the wrong path and wasting hours and hours of work on a family line that isn't ours.
I look forward to seeing your posts
Christina

[HeatherConnie]

Welcome to the site. I am also a newcomer to this forum, but have been researching my family history for a while now. I have found a monthly subscription to findmypast a real bargain when looking up information about my Devon roots. It allows access to unlimited images, so there is no waste in checking out possible but uncertain records, unlike scotlandspeople where each record must be paid for, and the newspaper collection is a real treasure trove. A good example in my own search was a family member who was listed as an agent in a 19th century advertisement for Schweppes tonic water. I was then able to search that address using just his first name, and found two census pages where the family name FROST had been wrongly transcribed as "Trost" and "Dhoot".

[Megan Roberts]

I always like to point out FREE resources to people starting out.

The National Archives have a huge number of very helpful research guides.
https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/h...family-history

In this forum we will always emphasise the importance of getting certificates (birth marriage and death) to back up and confirm research, and having had a quick look at the National Archives research guide on that related topic I don't think that it is as clear as it could be about the latest position regarding searching the various indexes. So my own potted summary would be:

For England & Wales civil registration of births, marriages and deaths came into being in 1837. The indexes are available online either through commercial sites, or through FREEBMD. However, for births and deaths up to say 1915 I would use the General Register Office site (link below) because, for births their index includes the mother's maiden name, which no other site does prior to 1911, and for deaths their index includes an age, which no other index does prior to the mid 1860s, and its free to use. However, you can't search the marriage index there. You can however order certificates direct there. In fact certificates should only be ordered from the GRO.

https://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/c...es/default.asp


Another important record collection to look at is Censuses. However, they are only released every 100 years, so the last available census is that for 1911. These are available on the commercial sites, but there is also FREECEN. Findmypast, has something called the 1939 Register, which is very similar to a census, and was taken immediately before World War 2. That is not available anywhere else.

If you are looking for military records, be aware that the Ministry of Defence has not release records of anyone serving in the forces after 1921. You can apply to the MoD for those records, but there is a charge. With regards the records before that date they are available on commercial sites, but again be aware that with regards to World War 1 service records 60 per cent of them were destroyed during an air raid in World War 2.

[HeatherConnie]

I absolutely agree with using free material as much as possible, as well as doing as much as possible with the free aspects of commercial sites before deciding to go ahead and purchase an image. I have found familysearch, freecen and freebdm very useful. There are also great resources out there for specific areas of research. Some that I have found valuable are, Lloyds register of ships; the ADM 175 records for coast guards, and the Ellis Island site for relatives arriving in the USA. (my great grandfather "commuted" back and forward between the shipyards of Dundee and Boston at the beginning of the 20th Century). I mentioned the newspaper collection because I feel I have had incredible value with that, finding birth, marriage and death notices, records of events that relatives have been involved in, from shipwrecks in the Arctic to cake demonstrations at the W.R.I., and huge amounts of background relating to the places where my family lived. Of course some of this would be available free with google or wiki.

[geneius]

Another free site you may find useful

https://www.southderbyshirebdm.co.uk/baptisms.html

This is a must:
Probably one of the most usable free sites is www.familsearch.org with research centres worldwide where you can order and view the films this site contains Parish registers,(PR) Bishops Transcripts ( BT's) census, UK BMD, and a whole load mo