genealogy, where do I start?

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!

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.

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

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.

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.

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

You might look into steam punk

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.

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

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.

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?

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

Start with the census. These have been taken every 10 years since 1841 and all those up until 1911 have been released.

It is not flawless, each household was visited and their answers written down by an enumerator. This can lead to very strange spellings of names by the enumerator, then the very poor writing of some enumerators, leads to further mistakes by the Ancestry (and other) transcribers.

I also found that some households get missed. My family lived at the same address for about 50 years, yet in one census do not appear at that address or any other, although adult children who moved away to other addresses do.

I would also recommend joining a local Family History Society as these often provide help and support - as well as access to free research sites. Which county do your parents/grandparents come from?

If the family lived in the same parish for some time start there. I went back to 1797 in one day from Parish records.

I forgot, there is also the GRO site, you have to register but it is free and you get the mother’s maiden name on the birth registrations. This is also the place to buy your certificates from, if you don’t need a ‘proper’ certificate you can get a PDF version which is cheaper.

Before you spend any money look at the free sites, there is FreeBMD, FreeCEN (Census returns - not complete, but growing) and FreeREG (mainly before 1837, but I’ve found more recent registrations on there. Keep everything on your own computer using a free version of something like RootsMagic, I use Family Historian which is excellent but they only do a free trial. Also look at Lost Cousins which is also free and you might be lucky enough to find a ‘cousin’ who can fill in a few gaps for you.

I used Findmypast as I didn't find there was much difference
between that and ancestry. I managed to go back to the 1500s on my Mum's English side and I also found out that I'm a fourth cousin of Reece Shearsmith, the actor who coincidentally was already an acquaintance of my daughter. It's a fantastic hobby to have but can become quite absorbing and time consuming,I agree with the poster who suggested making notes too, sometimes it is difficult to find some things again. I also downloaded copies of censuses (censi??) and birth, death and marriage notices. Good Luck.

My grandfather and his parents of Scottish ancestry were born in India in the 1800s. Although I tried to find them Ancestry did not have their records. My maternal grandmother was of Irish descent and Ancestry at the time I had the subscription did not have Irish records. Also, my mother's father who was English and fought in the first World War is not in the records. Apparently a lot of the records from that time were destroyed. I did find records from my father's mothers side and luckily found a lot of information going back about 300 years,

If you need help getting started please feel free to send me a private email. I've been doing Genealogy for 50 years and am currently wrestling with my Son-in-law's. I got back to pre-Norman times on one line, which was extremely lucky, mostly because of an unusual surname, but also because of the help of a good friend in London who could get to the National Archives.
Margaret

I have an Ancestry subscription but reluctantly had to let my Findmypast one lapse as it was too expensive to have both. I have also done the Ancestry DNA test and found lots of (very) distantly related cousins through that but nothing to help my Menzies line brickwall! I have used the Scottish site but have been advised that the marriage and burials registers for the church at Durisdeer have been lost so have found it so difficult to find out how my ancestor came to be in the area in the 1750's. Lots of useful tips and advice on here, I would add that there are often dedicated groups at Rootsweb and also on Facebook for surnames, regions etc so might be worth joining these too - and they are free to join/use which is a bonus