United Kingdom and Worldwide Resources

 UNITED KINGDOM

Genuki – Major portal site for the British Isles.

GenGuide – Information and useful links on research sources and where to find them.

FamilySearch.org:

Census Records – England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland

The first place to search for your family in census records (free) is www.familysearch.org.  You’ll find images attached to the census records for England and Wales but indexes only for Scotland.

British Military Records

England

Vision in Britain has reliable in-depth information about the geography and historical context of the places your ancestors lived.

Price and Associates, Expert Links: English Family History and Genealogy, beginning in 1976, has developed talented teams of professional genealogists in Salt Lake City to assist people in tracing their family history. This site gives an amazing array of links to all kinds of topics, although some of the may be out  of date.

The British Newspaper Archive is a collaborative effort between the British Library and BrightSolid online publishing (owners of FindMyPast, Genes Reunited) to digitize over 40 million newspaper pages at a rate of about 8,000 new pages each day. The main focus is on newspapers before 1900 although about 15% of the collection falls after this date (it has a very powerful search engine that enables one to search by region, county, city, newspaper title and date (down to a single day for a single paper). It is a subscription data base but was offering a limited number of free credits for those registering. It is also available free at our local family history centre.

Historical Directories is a digital library of local and trade directories for England and Wales, from 1750 to 1919. The project seeks to provide at least one directory, for each segment depicted on the geographical map for each of the following decades: 1850’s 1890s 1910s. The project ended in 2005 but the range of information available is useful for getting a picture of the countries during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The same content is now available in Ancestry UK, City and County Directories, 1766 – 1946. We recommend this means of access to genealogists with an Ancestry subscription or access via their local library. The directories were originally digitised as part of the Historical Directories project, funded by the Big Lottery Fund. The original website can still be accessed via the UK Web Archive.

Many directories have been digitized and can be found online using Google Books and Internet Archive.

Connected Histories currently includes twenty-two major digital resources for the period 1500-1900 . Information includes their coverage, the technical methods used in their creation, their particular strengths and weaknesses, and any access arrangements which may apply.

Scotland

Births/Baptisms, Marriages and Deaths/Burials – check the free FamilySearch website to see if the family are included in the index.  It is not complete but it is worth a look.

The pay-to-view official website ScotlandsPeople has indexes linked to images of the entry.

Census records – FamilySearch has indexes from 1841 to 1891.  The pay-to-view websites Ancestry.co.uk and FindmyPast have indexes from 1841 to 1901. To view the actual census page you will need to go to the ScotlandsPeople website (pay-to-view).

Places – The ScotlandsPlaces website is a good free resource for a description and photos of the place where your ancestors lived.

Wills and Testaments – search the index from 1513-1925 at the ScotlandsPeople website.

Other useful sources of information for researching your Scottish ancestors:

  • The Scotland wiki at FamilySearch.org.  The first page gives general information about researching in Scotland with links on the left column to information by subject.  Scroll down the page to link to information on each county with a further link from the county page to the parish.
  • The Scottish Association of Family History Societies and their websites.
  • If you are interested in the history of your county and parish written in the 1790s and 1840s you’ll want to read all about it from the Statistical Accounts of Scotland website You do not need to log in.  Click the browse scanned pages link.
  • Search the catalogues of over 50 Scottish archives via the Scottish Archive Network website.
  • Free online videos by professional genealogists to give you tips about researching your Scottish ancestors

Wales

 Welsh newspapers free online – The National Library of Wales has put an enormous collection of Welsh newspapers online.

Ireland

 Ireland Reaching Out – Discover your place of origin in Ireland.  Connecting people of Irish heritage with their parish origin.

seeking to connect people of Irish heritage with their parish of origin.

 Public Records Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) – The official archive for Northern Ireland.

Worldwide

FamilySearch.org – A jumping off point to begin your family research.

FamilySearch Research Wiki – Genealogical research advice, or learn where to find record collections.

Cyndi’s List – a trusted genealogy research site for more than twenty years with a categorized & cross-referenced index to genealogical resources on the Internet.

Census Finder – Links to free census indexes in various countries

Rootsweb – a site for mailing lists, surname lists and much more. [Note: The Rootsweb Mailing Lists were shut down on or around May 1, 2023. Hosted websites will become read-only beginning in early 2024. At that time, all logins will be disabled, but hosted sites will remain on RootsWeb as static content. Website owners wishing to maintain their sites must migrate to a different hosting provider before 2024.]