Genealogy for beginners

A plain-English starting point for UK family history: what to gather at home, which records to search first, how to prove each link and the mistakes that cost beginners years.

Family history in the UK is unusually well served: for most families, a few hours of free searching will take you back to the 1840s, and a modest amount of patience will take you to the 1700s. The trick is to do it in the right order and to prove each step before you take the next. This guide is the map; the other guides fill in each record set.

The one rule: work backwards, one generation at a time

Start with yourself, then your parents, then their parents. Never jump to a famous namesake or a convenient entry two centuries back and try to fill in the middle. Each generation is proved by a record that links a child to named parents (a birth certificate, a baptism, a census household) and each of those gives you the clue for the next step back. Skipping a link is how people spend ten years researching someone else's family.

Step 1: what you already have

Before any website, collect what's in the family: certificates, old letters, photographs with names on the back, funeral cards, medals, a family bible, an address book. Talk to the oldest relatives first and write down what they say, including the stories you doubt; they usually contain a kernel of truth. Our guide to interviewing relatives and home sources covers the questions to ask.

Step 2: civil registration, 1837 onwards

Every birth, marriage and death in England and Wales has been registered since July 1837 (Scotland 1855, Ireland 1864). The indexes are free to search and each certificate names parents, spouses, ages, occupations and addresses: the backbone of the tree back to the early Victorian period. See birth, marriage and death records.

Step 3: the census, 1841 to 1921

Taken every ten years, the census shows the whole household on one night: names, ages, relationships, occupations and birthplaces. Find your family in 1921 or 1911 and follow them back a decade at a time; each census tells you where to look for the births and marriages that confirm the links. See census records and the 1939 Register that fills the gap to living memory.

Step 4: before 1837, the parish

Earlier than civil registration, the evidence is the Church of England parish register: baptisms, marriages and burials, often back to the 1500s. The census birthplaces tell you which parish to search. This is where research slows down and gets interesting; see parish registers.

Step 5: flesh on the bones

Once the skeleton is there, wills, military records, newspapers, trade directories and maps turn names and dates into lives. Scottish and Irish families have their own records and their own problems; see Scottish ancestry and Irish ancestry.

Where to search

Much of the above is free. The free websites guide lists what FreeBMD, FreeCEN, FreeREG, FamilySearch and the archives' own sites give you for nothing; the paid sites compared guide explains when a subscription earns its keep and how to use one through your library instead.

Keep a system from day one

Record where every fact came from, keep a research log of what you searched and didn't find, and store your tree in a program you control as well as any website. The organising guide and charts guide show how. Future you will be grateful.

Beginner mistakes to avoid

• Accepting other people's trees as fact. Online trees are clues, not evidence. Copying one copies its errors.
• Insisting on one spelling. Surnames were written as they sounded until well into the 1800s. Search variants.
• Trusting ages. People rounded, guessed and lied. Treat a census age as plus or minus a few years.
• Assuming the only match is the right one. Villages had several John Smiths. Prove it with a second record.
• Buying certificates you don't need. Use the indexes and the census to narrow down before paying.

Start with the first ten steps and the FAQs, and come back to the record guides as you reach each one.