For those beginning genealogy: what do you hope to achieve? For me, being of an idealistic and romantic bent, genealogy is fundamentally about reclaiming the past for the millions of ordinary people who have otherwise been forgotten. I am fascinated by social history I don't just want to know the names of those I am descended from, I want to find out as much as possible about the conditions of their everyday lives. This is what has motivated me to research my family history for the past decade.

Before you embark on this undertaking, you need to ask yourself what motivates you, because it is this that will determine the goals and objectives you set for yourself and shape the way you use the resources (including the internet) available to you. Perhaps you just want to trace all your ancestors of one name back as far as possible - this is called a pedigree line - or even extend your research to include all the instances of that name you are able to find. You may have an unusual surname and are interested in tracing its origins and making contact with others who share it. The Guild of One Name Studies has its own web page (www.one-name.org), which you should visit to see if the study of your name has already been started by someone else or in order to register your own area of interest.

Perhaps you want to compile a family tree displaying your ancestry back as far as possible. Although it is very unusual to trace any line back beyond the mid-sixteenth century, when records began to be kept in a systematic way, some people have managed to establish links with those living as far back as 1380. Initially, a good goal to set yourself is to try and trace all 16 of your great-great grandparents. This doesn't sound like a lot, but believe me it is quite a challenge, and will easily bring most of those of you born between 1920 and 1949 back to 1837 and the very beginning of the UK's General Register of Births, Deaths and Marriages.

A narrative approach can be very satisfying as well as being a useful way of summarising all the various bits of information one quite quickly accumulates about particular ancestors. Writing up what you find out in a story form also makes your discoveries more accessible to other researchers and family members. The internet has made publication a viable option for many people: it is surprisingly easy to build your own web page and I will give you some pointers later on.

You may share the name of someone very famous, or perhaps there is a tradition in your family that you are all descended from Native Americans. However, you must suppress any fantasies you may harbour about starting with a biography of Pocahontas and tracing her lineage down through the ages until you arrive at yourself. Although it is possible that you may well be one of her 32,000 supposed descendants, it really doesn't work that way. A good researcher should never set out with a prejudiced and preconceived idea about what they will find. Besides, one of the more fascinating aspects of genealogy - particularly genealogy on the internet - is discovering things about your origins of which you had no idea.

Start with what you know

Whatever your motivation, the best way to begin is by writing down everything you and your relatives know (or think you know) about yourselves and the previous generation. Talk to elderly relatives, record their memories, collect names, dates and locations, identify family members in photographs and start to fill in a family checklist. By working backwards one generation at a time in this way you will be able to establish a basic family tree. It is at this point that you can start to use the internet to help build a more vivid picture. By guiding you towards a variety of sources, which will in turn help you to access more information from more sources, the internet will help you join together and put flesh on the dry bones of your personal history.

It is important to note that, as far as UK research goes, the internet cannot help you much at the moment in the search for vital records of deceased ancestors born after the end of the nineteenth century. You will have to rough out a family tree back to at least the turn of the twentieth century using the primary sources available to you before the internet can be relied upon to help with filling in any gaps. The internet can, however, help you to locate and make contact with living relatives (before they find you) and I will look at this aspect in due course.

Primary sources and vital records

Your computer and the web are powerful adjuncts to your research. And they have the advantage of being available to you at all hours of the day and night. However, there really is no substitute for the diligent, painstaking (and quite often dull and tedious) work of sifting through the "primary sources" that constitute most historical research.

Primary sources are original documents, records and so forth, as opposed to transcriptions (that is copies) or treatments (books, articles, analyses) of those sources. The internet has very little in the way of primary sources. What it does have, in increasing abundance, are indexes and catalogues and transcriptions, all prone to human error. Even on the websites maintained by major depositories and archives, you must be wary of errors and omissions and can only ever be certain of the veracity of something if you have seen the primary source with your own eyes.

For this reason, most of your genealogical research will take place in the relevant public record offices and libraries, but the internet can help you to make the best use of the time you spend poring over indexes and registers. By using the copious amounts of information available online in an intelligent way you can save hours of fruitless searching and avoid spending money on copies of certificates, for example, that you don't need or that refer to someone else's ancestor.

One of the most useful aspects of online research is the ease with which you can discover offline resources. The internet can help you to discover the precise locations of records and archives, as well as providing you with information about opening times and contact numbers (including e-mail addresses) for queries. The Genuki site is particularly helpful in this respect. It is organised hierarchically, first by county and then by parish, and has comprehensive links to a great many family history and genealogy societies throughout the British Isles, as well as county record offices (CROs) and major national projects relating to archives and records.

Public records - the basics

The nation's principal archive, the Public Record Office, Ruskin Avenue, Kew, Richmond, Surrey TW9 4DU, is the home of most of our major national documents from the Domesday Book on, and at some point your research will lead you there. It also maintains an excellent website, complete with opening times, guides to the collections (which include military, immigration and emigration records, and many more) and a comprehensive searchable database of its stores at www.pro.gov.uk.

If you go to the site's Genealogy page you will discover indispensable information on researching family history using public records, including the free downloadable Family Fact Sheets on genealogy (www.pro.gov.uk/genealogy/familyfacts.htm) which are particularly helpful and informative. By spending a few informed minutes online you will be able to save yourself precious time when you eventually visit Kew, by knowing precisely what it is you are looking for and where it can be found.

Civil registration - England and Wales 1837 to the present day

The indexes to the General Register of Births, Marriages and Deaths for England and Wales from 1837 to the present are available for free searches by members of the public at the Family Record Centre, 1 Myddelton Street, London EC1R 1UW. To find out about the centre visit the FRC page on the Public Record Office website at www.pro.gov.uk/about/frc/ default.htm. Here you will also be able to access free leaflets telling you how to use the search rooms at the FRC.

Once you have found the index entry, birth, marriage and death certificates can be ordered from the FRC, for £6.50 and they will be posted to you, or ready for you to collect, within four working days (though do check, as sometimes it takes much longer). It is more expensive to have them ready for next-day collection (£22.50). Alternatively, you can request a search of the index at the General Register Office (GRO) in Southport, Merseyside. It will cost you £11 for a three-year search, including the certificate (if they can find one), and £3 for any additional three-year searches.

You should aim to collect birth, marriage and death certificates for each of your direct ancestors as far back as 1837. As I research a family in depth, I seek out the certificates pertaining to siblings, too. The more information you gather, the more vivid the picture of the family. I also always look for the certificates of any family members born, married or dying near the date of a census, so I have an address to look up on the census.

From a birth certificate you will be able to discover the name of the father and his occupation. You will also have the address of the family home to check on the nearest available census. A marriage certificate gives you slightly more information. It tells you the names, addresses and occupations of the happy couple as well as the names and occupations of their fathers. Witnesses to the marriage are also included and it is worth noting these, as they quite often out to be relatives. You are also given the location of the marriage, providing you with a big clue where to look on parish registers for the rest of the family. A death certificate will tell you the age at death, the cause of death, the occupation of the dead person (or their husband's occupation in the case of women), their address at the time of death and the name, address and a description of the informant, usually a relative.

Census returns

The FRC also holds copies on microfilm of the population census carried out in the UK every ten years from 1841 to 1891. These are available for free search by members of the public. The PRO website has guides to each of the censuses, which you can print out to take with you on your visit. To find, for example, the 1841 census guides you need to enter the following: www.pro.gov.uk/readers/frcleaflets/ 1841census.htm. This is the same address for leaflets on all the censuses - simply substitute 1841 with the date in which you are interested. Copies of the census returns for each area are also kept at County Record Offices.

The census returns are one of my favourite pieces of historical documentation. You can discover not only how ancestors earned their livings, but whether they had servants, details about their children and, by nosing around their neighbours' entries, you can find out a lot about the area in which they lived. Census returns point you in new directions. They provide you with clues as to likely marriage dates, birth dates and, after 1841, the birthplaces of ancestors, all of which gives you insight into the way a family might have lived. Once you know where an ancestor lived and what they did, you can go and do more general research about the lives they may have led. Using general search techniques, you can search the web for information about the region they came from and their occupations.

If you only buy one piece of genealogy software, let it be the CD-Rom of the 1881 census, produced by the Mormons, which you can buy from the Familysearch website (you will have to pay import duty separately on top of the quoted price). The 1881 census is the only one that is fully indexed and you can consult the index on microfiche at the FRC and some local family history societies and county register offices. The recording of it on to CD-Rom, however, is a fantastic advantage. I use my copy constantly and have found so many ancestors this way that I have lost count.

While on the subject of the censuses, it is important to be aware of "strays". These are individuals who crop up on the census, giving their birthplace as somewhere other than the place in which they are recorded as living. In the nineteenth century, many families moved away from the villages with which they had long associations in the search for work and new horizons. Trying to find them on a census return, especially one for a large city, can be more difficult than searching for the proverbial needle. The indexing of "strays", therefore, is a necessity for genealogists. We would otherwise lose ancestors who have moved away from their birthplace, often to locations with which they have no apparent link. Genuki carries a list of strays organised by county and you can access it by going to www.genuki.org.uk/big/£census and clicking on UK Census Finding Aids and Indexes. You will also find strays listed by county on the well organised Gendocs pages at www.gendocs. demon.co.uk/england.html.

In addition, many local family history societies have compiled general indexes to the 1851 census for their area. By linking to their sites, via Genuki, you will be able to access information, which, in turn, will help you to locate your ancestors more easily on the actual census return at the FRC or County Record Office.

Parish registers

Once you are back before 1837 (and even during the reign of Victoria, particularly if your ancestors remained in one area) in England and Wales, you will need to search the relevant parish registers. These are the records that parish priests were obliged to keep of all the christenings, marriages and burials conducted by them from the mid-sixteenth century onwards. These are normally held at the relevant County Record Offices. You generally have to make an appointment beforehand and sometimes give some indication of what it is you are hoping to search. The internet can not only help you to track down the most likely location of parish registers, but it can also help you in your search of the registers.

The International Genealogical Index

The Familysearch site (www.familysearch.org), has over 300m names taken from parish registers (mainly baptismal records and some marriages) and other sources - many of them from the UK. This resource, known as the International Genealogical Index (IGI), was started by the Mormons as part of a rolling programme to baptise posthumously as many of their own ancestors as possible before the Day of Judgement. The IGI is an incredible resource, which has been available for more than ten years on microfiche at local family history societies and some libraries and County Record Offices. Since May 24 1999 it has been available to search for free online.

Familysearch can provide you with clues about where to look next for ancestors. When you reach the home page, click on Custom Search and then select IGI from the list of options. Enter information about the individual(s) you are researching and the computer will return a list of "possibles" in batches of up to 75 names per page. I print out the pages for future reference (if asked by your computer, select the "as shown on screen" option), because, particularly if you have an unusual name, the distribution of surnames across the whole country gives you clues as to the most likely location for a particular family's records.

You can select any of the individuals from the IGI for more information on a record, which carry the date of baptism, parents' names and the place of baptism. If you are lucky and find "one of yours", the baptism date and place can help you to quickly locate a birth registration on the General Register Office (GRO) index, or a baptism on the parish register.

The IGI can also help you find marriages in much the same way, returning a record showing the name of the bride and groom, and the date and location of the marriage. I would also use the IGI to conduct a Parent Search, which will return a list of all the children in the database born to the couple specified. To do this you enter the name of the father and at least the mother's first name in the right-hand fields on the search page then select the region and click on Search.

However, a word of warning: not all the transcriptions are accurate. I have found several mistakes when using it, particularly in the way names and places are spelt. I should say, however, that the IGI is quite clever at finding names that are similar to the one you have entered. Where spellings vary, even slightly, this is an important feature. It will also, for instance, look for Johns if you enter Jack, and will include Mary Anns, Marys and Pollys in the same search.

Future developments - post-2000

After 2002 you will be able to search the 1901 census on the internet - available for a minimum fee of about £5 via the Public Record Office website www.pro.gov.uk.

The Society of Genealogists (www.sog.org.uk) is another excellent resource, and its site is full of useful information (including a well-researched online publication, Computers in Genealogy). At the time of writing, the SOG had just announced plans to provide online access to some of its extensive collection of transcripts on a pay-per-view basis. These will include lists of apprentices, some wills and some marriage and burial indexes, including the Vicar General Marriage Licence Index. This features the names of over 350,000 people who were married by licence issued by the Vicar General of the Archbishop of Canterbury, between 1694 and 1850, and is already available online at ourworld.compuserve.com/ homepages/david_squire/vicgenl.htm.

The Rootsweb site at www.rootsweb.com, dedicated to free access to genealogical information via the web, is chiefly US-oriented, but hosts several pages of interest to the European researcher, most of which are only accessible via the Rootsweb server. Chief among these is FreeBMD (www.freebmd. rootsweb.com or via www.rootsweb.com) which is an ongoing volunteer project aimed at uploading (that is putting on the internet) the General Register of Births, Marriages and Deaths for England and Wales and giving researchers free access. The last time I checked in, I managed to find GRO Index references for some of my elusive Bugbird ancestors. Perhaps by the time you read this they will have many more names - including some of yours. They are also looking for volunteers to help in this very worthwhile project.

Researching Scottish ancestry

If you are researching Scottish ancestors you will need to check the main records in the care of the Registrar General in Edinburgh. They have a useful and informative leaflet available online at www.gro-scotland.gov.uk/grosweb/grosweb.nsf/ pages/leaflet1 which will tell you how to get started and what is available. Scottish certificates are much more informative than English and Welsh ones - they include, for example, the maiden surnames of mothers of the bride and groom on marriage certificates, which is a great boon.

There is a searchable database on the web of all the vital records for Scotland from 1855 to 1898 (deaths to 1924), the old parochial records from 1553 to 1854 and the 1891 census entries, which you can access on payment of a fee. The site, at www. origins.net/gro, is called Scots Origins and it is run by the General Register Office for Scotland and a company called Origins.net, a specialist in uploading transcripts of vital records to the net. At the time of writing, the fee for access to the database was £6 for 30 page credits, valid for 24 hours, each page credit offering up to 15 search results. You can also order certificates online (£10 each in June 2000).

If you don't live in Scotland, I think this service is good value for money. Used in conjunction with the Familysearch site to check dates and locations on the IGI, you can, if you are lucky, go quite a long way through your family line without having to leave home. I recently managed to find three generations of my father's family this way in one short session. However, because the database only goes up to 1899, you need to have traced back to the late nineteenth century before the Scots Origins site can help you. The FRC has a terminal linked to the site, which can trace records up to the twentieth century, for a fee of £4.50 for half an hour.

Researching Irish and Northern Irish ancestry

Those of you researching Irish and Northern Irish ancestry can use the Genuki pages to help locate the available records. Civil registration began in Ireland in 1864, and after December 31 1921 Northern Ireland maintained separate provisions for the registration of births, marriages and deaths. The National Archive of Ireland is located at Bishop Street in Dublin (www.nationalarchives.ie/genealogy.html). Its web page will tell you all that you need to start your research.

The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland is located at 66 Balmoral Avenue, Belfast BT9 6NY and its web page is proni.nics.gov.uk.

Death and burial records

Genealogists compiling a family tree attempt to "hatch, match and despatch" each and everyone of their direct line - that is trace and record the births/christenings, marriages, and deaths/interments of individuals and their two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, 16 great-great grandparents, 32 great-great-great grandparents, 64 great-great-great-great grandparents, and so on. At present, unless you are Scottish, there is little available on the internet relating to deaths and burials in the UK. The otherwise brilliant Familysearch website has no burials at all in its database, so this is one area where offline resources will (unless you are very lucky - or of Scottish descent) be the only route available to you.

One notable exception to this is in the search for ancestors and relatives who died in the two world wars. The Debt of Honour Register is a no-fee searchable database containing the names and other details of 1.7m Commonwealth (UK and former colonies) soldiers who died in these conflicts. It is compiled by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission at www.cwgc.org or yard.ccta.gov.uk/cwgc/ register.nsf/searchpage?openform.

Other records and sources

In addition to registers of births and baptisms, marriages, and deaths and burials, there are other primary sources that have survived the ages. The best place to find out about these records and their availability is the web page of the Public Record Office (www.pro.gov.uk). There is also a National Register of Archives, which can help you to track down the documents held by particular counties, at www.hmc.gov.uk/main.htm. This is a far from exhaustive list of some of these sources, concentrating on those that the internet can help you to locate.

Wills and Grants of Administration

The further back you go, wills and Grants of Administration in the case of intestacy (Admons) are often only means you have of establishing the relationships between individuals. They also often provide a more personal insight into the lives of ancestors than some other records.

Since 1858 all wills and Admons proved in England and Wales have been centrally administered and indexes of them can be searched for free at the FRC and at some CROs. There is a comprehensive guide from the FRC on the subject of wills and probate records, which you can download for free from www.pro.gov.uk/readers/frcleaflets/ willsmain.htm. You should read and print out the guide, and take it with you when you visit the FRC. A copy of every post-1858 will is kept at the Probate Search Room, First Avenue House, 42-49 High Holborn, London WC1V 6NP (020 7936 7000).

Pre-1858, wills in England were proved at one of 300 ecclesiastical courts and it can be difficult tracking them down. The Public Record Office's series of Finding Aids leaflets includes an excellent one on probate records, which you can download for free at www.pro.gov.uk/leaflets/ri2241.htm.

In Wales, all pre-1858 wills proved locally are kept at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth and you can find out all about this resource on its bilingual website www.llgc.org.uk.

In Scotland, wills and deeds are to be found at the National Archives of Scotland, General Register House, Edinburgh EH1 3YY and you can e-mail them at research@nas.gov.uk.

In Ireland, quite a lot of wills were among official papers destroyed in 1922, but there are indexes, and these can be found at the National Archives of Ireland. To find out more visit its genealogy page www.nationalarchives.ie/genealogy.html and click on Wills and Administrations.

Military records

These are extensive and mostly located at the Public Record Office, Ruskin Avenue, Kew, Richmond, Surrey TW9 4DU (www.pro.gov.uk). To find anything useful, you generally need to know your ancestor's name and the regiment they served in, and to have some idea of the period in which they served. The PRO has prepared several leaflets to help you find military records as part of its Family Fact Sheets at www.pro.gov.uk/genealogy/familyfacts.htm.

The Scottish GRO also has some records of service from 1881 to 1959, detailing the births, marriages and deaths of Scottish servicemen and women and some fragments of the War Registers from the Boer War (1899-1902), and the first and second world wars.

Immigration and emigration records

The PRO has the biggest collection of papers relating to UK immigrants and emigrants and the Family Fact Sheet gives a comprehensive breakdown of what there is and where to find it all (www.pro. gov.uk/genealogy/familyfacts.htm). These range from Naturalisation Papers and Certificates of Aliens to some passenger lists of ships sailing into and out of British ports, mostly in the late-nineteenth century. There are also papers relating to the convict transports to New South Wales and Tasmania.

The Immigrant Ship Transcribers' Guild is a wonderful internet resource, again part of the Rootsweb venture. These volunteers are creating an online searchable database of information from passenger ships sailing to and from ports worldwide from the seventeenth century. So far they have managed to collect most data from the past 200 years. The site (istg.rootsweb.com) is fascinating, even if you don't manage to find any ancestors. It will also tell you how you can become involved in the project.

Genuki also carries numerous links to pages covering many aspects of emigration from the UK and Ireland to Canada and Australia (www.genuki.org. uk/big/emigration.html).

If you are researching ancestors who emigrated to the US, the American Family Immigration History Center at Ellis Island is creating an online searchable database of the 17m people who entered through New York Harbour between 1892 and 1924. Keep an eye on the site (which is very interesting in its own right) at www.ellisisland.org.

If you have ancestors and family members among the above, you might want to look for them on the US Social Security Death Index. This is available to search for free at www.rootsweb.com and contains the records of more than 63m people who died in the past 50 years, who had US social security numbers and whose deaths were reported to the Social Security Administration.

For those with Jamaican roots, Rootsweb also hosts the Genealogy of Jamaica site at www.rootsweb.com/~jamwgw/index.htm, which features maps, surname lists and so on.

Jewish ancestry

Two groups of Jews have migrated to the UK since the seventeenth century. The Sephardi came from southern Europe, particularly Portugal, in the seventeenth century, and the Ashkenazi came out of eastern and central Europe, mainly in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Tracing Jewish roots can be difficult, as many families changed their names, adopting more western-sounding ones, and few vital records remain intact in the towns from where they originally came.

In the UK, synagogues kept their own records - particularly of marriages and deaths - before and after Civil Registration, and many of these have been deposited in local record offices. The presumed local synagogue, therefore, may be a good starting place for ancestors who migrated to Britain in the early part of the nineteenth century or even before.

The Ashkenazi records are written Hebrew or Yiddish only. In addition, the names recorded are the Hebrew names given to individuals, and these may not relate to the everyday names used by individuals.

The Jewish Historical Society of England, 33 Seymour Place, London W1H 5AP (020 7723 5852) may be able to help you get started. There are several good places to start your hunt for Jewish ancestors on the internet. Genuki has a special topics section (www.genuki.org.uk/org/user.html£subjects). The Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain (www.jgsgb.ort.org) has a searchable database of surnames and towns, Jewish Chronicle obituaries from 1995 to the present and a Family Finder Index Page. JewishGen Family Finder (www.jewishgen.org) has thousands of details submitted from around the world, including a searchable database of more than 500,000 Jewish vital records from 115 nineteenth-century Polish towns.

Trade directories

All good local reference libraries will have copies of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century trade directories for their area. These make fascinating reading as well as being an invaluable source of information about ancestors who were in trades or professions or who were private residents. Many local family history societies provide extracts on their websites, and it is worth checking for these via the county links from Genuki.

Maps and gazetteers

Before long, you will feel the need to have a good map of the areas you are researching. Census returns in particular are unwieldy and any knowledge of an area's layout can prove hugely rewarding. You can find a list of Ordnance Survey map references to help you locate the correct map in the Landranger series at the OS website (www.ordsvy. gov.uk/products) and you can also download sections of OS maps at www.ordsvy.gov.uk/getamap/. You can find UK street maps at freebies. genealogy.org and a searchable database enabling you to find street maps at various scales by place name, London street, national grid reference or postcode at www.multimap.com.

The Millennium Map of Britain (www.millennium-map.com) features aerial photographs of large sections of the country, and the intention is that soon we will be able to zoom in on an aerial view of every home in Britain.

Historical maps can also be invaluable and there are reproductions of nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey maps available for reasonable sums. You can find a catalogue of them and an online order form at www.rallymap. demon.co.uk. There is also an index of Lost London Streets, compiled by William Hall, which is very useful in view of the numerous changes to London's layout that have occurred over the past 100 years (www.lost-london.inuk.com).

Genuki again has very good links to other sources of maps - many of which are featured on the various county and parish pages. There is also a searchable database of places as entered in the 1891 census at www.genuki.org.uk/big/£gazeteers.

Contact Sian Busby.