genealogy, where do I start?

Yes, I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the family history centres are free to use and people who man them are more than willing to help.
You can get family search and Ancestry for free in the centres,
plus they have microfiche, maps and films.
If you go on family search.org there are videos showing you
how to research your family. Good luck!

The hardest part of tracing your family history is the first Hundred years because most of the documents are closed for 100 Years. That is protect those who are in their senior years didn't find that heir parents or grandparents were not what they thought they were.
Ask all the senior members of your family about what they remember about their Aunts Uncles grandparents etc.
Before paying out money for for the Ancestry or FMP ask questions on Curious Fox www.curiousfox.com there are other sites you can ask questions on.
Depending where you are searching you may find Online Parish Clerk site. Like the Lancashire site www.lan-opc.org.uk/Search/indexp.html . Other counties have OPC's
Then there is The Gazette. www.thegazette.co.uk that includes births, marriages, deaths, court proceeding, bankruptcy . My own surname which is from Lancashire I have found over 40 spelling variations. That is possibly down to the scribe in the Church who possibly came from the next town and wrote down what he thought he heard. If you think they came from or went overseas there are shipping lists. If you still live in or close to the area your ancestors lived you have got the county records offices. Another good search place is Internet Archive - archive.org/index.php there are thousands of historical books that you can access. Like parish Registers, Victorian County History books. The list is endless. Unfortunately some of these have been swallowed up by sites you have to pay for. So do as much home work before you start spending your money.
Good Hunting

I belong to RootsChat.com.
There are very helpful people on there who don't charge.
I don't use the site for my ancestry but for history of my home town.
Luckily I have letters, news cuttings, paintings and chats with ancient relatives which tell me all I want to know about my family

a lot of sites say free and they are not, i have got back to the 15th century using family search they are free, and as all my relatives were from Scotland iv also signed up to a few free Scottish sites, but i started with one name and that was it, fascinating if addictive,

Reported

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grannyactivist I'm finding the current crop of 'researchers' are often lazy and simply look online as you said and copy what others have done. This means that an error will get duplicated over and over again as more people copy. I don't consider these people are true researchers. They simply want to use other people's information and not bother to find out for themselves. I think Ancestry has encouraged laziness, because in the old days you could not share like that, you had to go and find the information for yourself! This was either in the area where the event took place or in London. I had many trips to London in the 1990s. Now people expect it all to be handed to them on a plate.

I agree death certificates are helpful too, and I have purchased them all for my direct ancestors, but when you start researching there are a lot of certificates to buy! Birth and marriage certificates are more essential than death at the beginning. Due to the cost certificates including death can be purchased slowly over time as your research unfolds and gets more detailed.

Chestnut your point about using other people's family trees with caution is spot on. Many people simply copy and paste 'facts' from another's tree without seeking to confirm the details themselves. It's very time consuming I know, but it really is necessary to go back to original sources to verify information.
So many people (I'm finding more and more recently) simply don't bother.

Death certificates in Wales, England and N.Ireland give the name of the person who registered the death.

Death certificates in Scotland show who registered the death so can be helpfup in finding other family members,for instance on my GGM'death certificate it gave a name of a son I didn't know existed

There is some good advice on this thread which I needn't repeat. But an inquisitive mind and attention to detail are good qualities to have.

Most importantly, do not take information from other people's online trees without confirming the details for yourself. Many of them are complete fairy tales with the wrong people in the tree! Write down the relevant details and then look up the people/events yourself. Never make assumptions, you need evidence.

When you find a document on a website then download it to your computer so you can refer to it later. Have folders on your computer for different families and individuals.

I would also advise that you buy the birth and marriage certificates of direct ancestors because they are so important and may have small but critical pieces of information (Note: some are available on Ancestry so you don't need to buy the certificate). Death certificates are not so essential unless you have a query about the death.

i would start with you then parents ,then grandparents. that should do for the first few months. names birth/marriage/death/ do on both sides. the census will pick up where families livedand how many siblings. keep all notes dont throw anything out. question older relatives. make notes. dont be put off with. oh you dont want to hear that. actually yes i do..was told there was madness in our mortimer family. found out a late great aunt had epilepsy died young at 20 ,was classed as an idiot.(lovely) grrrrrr. have traced mortimer history back to 1400's and my mums birth family back to 1700's.(cockbill).. very interesting and in touch with siblings of birth family.at least we know where we come from...

I use the British Newspaper Archive to add extra information to census addresses etc; it's brilliant.

Hi,
I was raised in Miss Blyths childrens home in Witham and am looking to find anyone else who was there from 1942 - 1950, also school pics from Miss English school in 1945-48 and Maldon road school 1948-1950 Mr Hinchcliffe was the headmaster,my name back then was Madelaine.

Thank you Elegran. FreeBMD is a fantastic resource and though I havent done any transcribing in a while I did enjoy it and may volunteer again when I have more time.

Yes, when you think about time constraints, weather and the distances involved to get to a register office there can be a time lapse between birth and registration.

I've also encountered a few cases where I believe a birth was not registered in the time that was allowed before a fine was incurred. Instead of paying the fine the parent gave a later date of birth. One of my late husband's aunts knew this was the case with her. She steadfastly celebrated her birthday on the real date of her birth while her birth certificate said something different. She grumbled that her father saved a few pounds in fines but 60 years later it had delayed her pension!

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..

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.!

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.

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 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.

www.genesreunited.co.uk/

You can get a two week free trial here .

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.

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 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.