As a genealogy researcher, tracing your family history has become a much easier process with the advent of online services and websites to aid you in your genealogy research. Instead of travelling to various archives and public libraries to search for information, you can now access most of this material via your Internet connection, and there will be more to follow as more organisations and institutions make their once public but private archive collections available online.

But before diving straight into the first site you find and typing in your surname and hoping for a list of family members, there are some things to remember:

• Keep a note of the site(s) you have visited.
• If you are searching for more than one branch of a family tree, it is a good idea to corral each branch of the family history separately until such time as you know where the different threads and strands fit together.
• Researching your family history is an interesting process, but also a frustrating one if your family name is a common one, or the heads of the different generations had the same group of names. Of course the more common the name, the greater the chance the groups of names will also be similar. It makes sense then to corroborate the names along with additional information such as date of birth, place of birth, names of both parents BEFORE slotting the new names into the family history. For instance The Fred Smith who bombed the local store may not in fact be the Great Uncle Fred Smith you knew.

Some useful sites with genealogy information include:

• The Armed Forces
• State and Public Libraries
• State Archives
• Organisational Archives (if you know who your relatives worked for and when)
• School Archives
• Registers of births, marriages and deaths
• Newspaper archives
• Burial, Cremation and Cemeteries Boards. With regards to churchyards – a walk around the local graveyard is a very personal way of reconnecting with your relatives and ancestors and other significant characters from your place of birth or place where your family spent some time.
• Census – this information can only be released 100 years after collection so the last available date is 1901. Very early census records do not contain as much information as the later ones. Beware also for discrepancies with regards to names, ages and dates of birth when looking through this information.

Whilst you can enter a person’s name into a search engine and retrieve a vast amount of information, usually not about the person you are looking for. Most of the information on your family history will be contained within databases within the research sites, which is generally not available to search engines. You will need to use the search facility within each site to locate information on your relatives.