genealogy, where do I start?

Ancestry is probably the best, although try the free ones first to make sure you enjoy doing it. It can become an obsessive labour of love.

if you have your grandparents name/wedding certificate this will give you where they lived when they got married ,from there you can work out their birthdates and where born.the census will then pick them up and you can see other family members. ancestry.co.uk is the best site. sometimes you get a free trial....then have to pay .be sure you read the small print or you can get over charged or a recurring subscription.

I use Find my Past. There is also the free BMD and the free Yorkshire BMD. The British Newspaper Archive has proved very helpful for info on BMD announcements in local papers - I've found where people are buried and also probate details and the inquests on two of my great grandfathers who had accidental deaths (and some court cases!). The website 'Lost Cousins' has a regular newsletter with lots of tips in it and when you have info about your family from Census returns you can enter details on the Lost Cousins site and be cross referenced with others and maybe find some 'lost cousins'. Good luck!

I'd recommend this course...and the next presentation begins tomorrow!

www.futurelearn.com/courses/genealogy

It's a free online course.
When I did it there were learners from all over the world, some of whom had been researching their family trees for over 40 years!
As a beginner, I found it really informative...great fun too.

Enumerators , when someone has moved to England from Trewalchmai, Anglesey, oooops

Just out of interest, I registered for an account and have put my mother's EXACT details into www.familysearch.org, including her year of birth and my father's full name. Apparently there are 'no records' even though I registered her death myself! This is the Mormon website. Do they only keep records of those in the Mormon faith?

I also use Ancestry. If you join for a year you should be able to get a lot of info regarding your family tree. You can print out trees or pay for a book. It is very comprehensive.

Family search is not just Mormons. It's a bit hit and miss, though. It tends to be earler births, deaths and marriages.

The Church of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) find it important to be able to baptise their ancestors posthumously by proxy and thus make sure that they are eligible for heaven, where their family group will be complete, so they have digitised or scanned loads of records of all sorts, such as births, banns, marriages, deaths, burial maps, vestry books and other records from churches of all denominations, censuses, school registers, obituaries, biographies, work records, and so.

However, they can only digitise what they can get hold of, and they don't have access to absolutely everything. If you can find a list of the sources they have, you could possibly check whether they have any records at all from the date and place where your mother's events happened.

I believe they will even accept suggestions of things that someone would like them to digitise, but it may be some time (or never) before they get round to it.

You might look into steam punk

Ask in your local library to see if there is a local group which will help and advise you. Most areas do.

The Family Search site began as the International Genealogicial Index (IGI) compiled by members of the Mormon Church who travelled around the world indexing church registers for the purpose of the posthumous baptism as Elegran described.

Names in the IGI come from two sources.

Community Contributed IGI: Personal family information submitted to the LDS Church and/

Community indexed IGI: Vital and church records from the early 1500s to 1885.

The latter covers a lot of records but is by no means complete. Phillmore used to publish a book listing which parish records had and hadn't been transcribed but I don’t know if it is still updated/published.

Since then FS have worked with other indexing organisations to include data compiled elsewhere.

Personally, I find it better to use Free BMD as a starting point to find basic registration data, mother’s maiden name, link possible children of the same family etc. I like FreeBMD because I know it's accurate. Transcribing is double keyed - two volunteers separately transcribe each register page and anomalies in the transcriptions are investigated by a third.

I use Ancestry for census data, electoral rolls, military records, trade directories, international records and to search for more recent events not covered by FreeBMD yet. I also use it to locate members researching the same people.

Transcription for Ancestry can be a bit hit and miss. I don't know where it is carried out but there are a lot of errors. Sometimes one has to think creatively to figure out what a name might have been transcribed as. Some of the writing in older documents is hard to decipher. Transcribers have given it their best shot but something tells me a lot of the work might be done in countries where transcribers are unfamilar with old traditional names. Kezia is a name which crops up in my own history. It's a Biblical name, Hebrew but popular in Victorian times. That seems to flummox the transcribers unless written very clearly. Beware electoral roll data where the printed name was followed by J meaning Juror as eligible for jury service but has been indexed as a second or third initial in the person's given name.

I tend to use Family Search mainly for events which occurred before the start of civil registration 1837 but it can also turn up some useful data for later events. I like that FS often includes microfiche copies from birth and marriage registers which gives additional data such as the actual date of an events, addresses, who registered a birth, occupations, father’s names and witnesses names which obviates the need to purchase a certificate.

I began with, and still use sometimes, the rootsweb message boards. You subscribe to a local one to where you are researching , post the names you are interested in and someone will reply. There are many knowledgeable people on these lists.
www.rootsweb.com
Although rootsweb has been bought by Ancestry.com it is still free to use the message boards.

I’ve been thinks no of joining ancestry but as I’m Scottish it sounds as though it wouldn’t be much use.
Havent a clue where to start. Have very little info to go n and there is no one left to ask

Start with your own parents names, dob and marriage date. Search free bd and m. Then do grandparents and work back. Use census records which show who was living where and occupations. You will gradually build a picture. There is free family tree software about for you to chart it. Once you have basics move on to Ancestry or similar. Have fun.

Ellie Anne go to the website www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk
There you will find masses of information and help. If you can get to Edinburgh you can find all your ancestors recorded under one roof at the record office.
I found an absolute treasure there. A death certificate dating from 1855 - which was the first year of official registration in Scotland -unlike 1837 in England and Wales - on it were listed, by name and age, his wife (deceased) all his 12 children (alive and deceased) and both his parents, giving their full names and father's occupation and his length of time in Scotland.
He was Irish but had lived for 50 years in Scotland and was 97 when he died. Such detail. Not bad!
After that first year the extra information was thought irrelevant so from then there was less info but still a Scottish certificate is a vast improvement on an English one.
Most of the records are digitalised now so you can do lots online or you can spend a day week there for a daily fee. Lucky you!

There are online courses that you can use to learn how to trace records and family history which you can complete at times to suit yourself. There are also local family history groups in some places which you could join to get tips etc. One thing you do have to be aware of is that unless you use official records like the census, some older hand written records are open to error in the transcribing to online.

A word of warning about Ancestry, OP. It not only gives you useful 'hints' of records which may relate to people named on your family tree but it connects you to other family trees which contain people of that name and allows you to easily transfer that information to your tree. Don't do it unless you can be very sure that the information is correct (e.g backed up by records). Some trees are very carelessly constructed with unresearched information; people just copy stuff from other trees without checking sources and making sure that the information is accurate.

There is also a register created in 1939 for uk which Ancestry now have. The library option is good and sometimes there are special free weekends. Also you can do a lot with a 14 day trial members hip also free but can't be repeated. I have used online support group called rootschat.

www.genesreunited.co.uk/

You can get a two week free trial here .

I have used Freebmd and it is generally good but recently when I tried to look up the marriage year using the groom's full name Freebmd showed that she was married in 1981 (correct) and born in 1968!

It turned out that she was born in 1958 so the transcriber had made a mistake.

I have also noticed omissions even where a marriage is shown but only for one half of the couple.

It's still worth using though as it's free. Findmypast requires a fee for delving further than the basic details.

Ramblingrose22 FreeBMD are transcribing the index pages, and for a marriage there are two entries in the index, one for each partner. If John Smith married Mary Jones, the page with John Smith on it may be transcribed at a different time, and by different transcribers, to the one with Mary Jones on it, so it is possible that they have not yet reached one partner in the marriage you were looking for.

Each page is transcribed by at least two separate people, and any differences checked out by a supervisor, so there are few mistakes.

Did you email them to tell them about the 1858/1968 mistake? They would be grateful to hear about it from someone who knows for a fact when the birth occurred.

I have done some transcribing for FreeBMD. They were always looking for patient accurate people to transcribe. If anyone has an hour or two a week to spare I am sure they could use your time. They assign you photocopies of a few pages at a time, you download them, type the entries into a text file and return it to them and receive the next page. You can do as much or as little as you wish, no deadlines so long as you keep doing a bit at a time. I asked if I could do a specific date range and surname initial as I was researching family for that time. Didn't actually find them, but it was very interesting.

I have also done a lot of transcribing for Free BMD and don't understand what RamblingRose22 is saying about the "mistake".

Looking up a marriage may give you both parties to the event. You find one participant then click on the page number link. If (as Elegran says) both pages have been transcribed you will get a choice of possible spouses.

Unless the format has changed for more recent entries, a marriage entry will not give a year of birth. I am wondering if RR has then looked up the birth of the woman and has found a different person. When transcribing events, one is not actually putting in a year for each individual event, only the overall quarter date for the page.

The only thing I would suggest is that if you look at the family trees of other people they often make mistakes. I looked at a tree which someone in America had added my gran, who had never left Birmingham, (England) in her whole life but it seems according to this American tree that she had been married about 20 times, twice in one year and in different countries, Germany being one of them, had umpteen children and I think she was buried in America!! Bless, what an exciting life she must have had.!

Yes, FountainPen. (lI like your username) there are often several people of the same name. You have use other clues to work out which one was yours. Also, in the index the entries are grouped alphabetically under each quarter of the year - Jan to March, April to June, July to September and October to December. If they were born near the end of a quarter, they may have been registered in the next quarter - someone born in late February might not be registered until the April-June quarter, so they may not be where you thought they would be..