5 Vital Family History Resources

Your first stops for BMDs, censuses and more…

1911 Census
www.1911census.co.uk
The essential address for the most recently available census for England and Wales.

Quick tip: If you have credits at FindmyPast, you can also use them here. The site’s ‘My Records’ feature is a handy way to keep track of what you’ve looked at so far.

192.com
www.192.com
To find living relatives, this site wins hands down. It’s great for recent electoral rolls (2002-2009), as well as the 1861 Census, and BMDs from 1837 to 2004.

Quick tip: Stick to the 2009 electoral roll for living relative searches – it only requires credits, whereas previous rolls require £149.99 extended archive membership as well.

BMD Registers
www.bmdregisters.co.uk
This is a great source for nonparochial BMDs, so records of nonconformists, including Methodists, Baptists and Quakers are its strong point.

Quick tip: Tick the ‘all names’ search box – this will bring up people who aren’t the main subject of a record, eg parents and grandparents.

Deceased Online
www.deceasedonline.com
Find those elusive burial records, plot location maps and search scans of death registers here.

Quick tip: A search for ‘Smith’ will also give results for ‘Smithson’, and for some names you’ll find extra details such as ‘aka’ or ‘née’ after the surname.

FamilySearch
www.familysearch.org
This is the website of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As such, it’s the online home of the International Genealogical Index of parish records.

Quick tip: FamilySearch has started experimenting with new ways to access its collections – check them out at FamilySearch Labs

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 17th, 2010 at 2:21 pm and is filed under BMDs, Census, Getting started, Online resources, Parish Records, Research tips, Top starter tips, Using the census. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.