The one thing I’ve discovered whilst trying to trace my family tree is what a friendly and helpful bunch other family history researchers are. Early on in my research I decided to put my family tree information onto the Genes Connected website www.genesconnected.com the Roots Web website http://worldconnect.rootsweb.com as a way of making contact with others researching the same names as me. Both sites allow you to import a GEDCOM file so as I was already using software on my PC to record my family tree it was very easy to export my data in the appropriate format and then import into my area of Genes Connected and World Connect. This meant that I didn’t have to type everything in again which would have been a real pain. Through these sites I’ve made contact with a number of distant cousins and we have shared information which has allowed us to add information to our own trees. One contact in particular provided me with information that took one line of my family back another 200 years to 1600.

Another site which I have used is www.ukbdm.co.uk where family history researchers can post details of birth, marriage and death certificates they have and are willing to share with others. At the moment the site seems to be under used and would benefit from more researchers posting information but it did come up trumps for me. I did a search in hope rather than expectation and low and behold there was my great grandmother’s name. Subsequent contact with the owner of the entry not only gave me the information I wanted without having to pay £7 for a copy of a birth certificate but also information about other members of the family and contact with a second cousin I never knew I had.

More recently I have signed up with a couple of family history subscription lists. As my family don’t come from the Midlands, I have found these lists very helpful and interesting and many people have kindly looked up information for me or given me advice on where to look next when I’ve been stuck. There are lists for most counties - see www.genuki.org.uk/indexes/MailingLists.html for a complete list. To start with I subscribed to most of the counties my ancestors lived in, 6 in all. This turned out to be completely unmanageable as each day there would be dozens and dozens of emails in my inbox, so now I just belong to two which relate to the areas I am researching at the moment. I also subscribe in digest mode which means that instead of getting lots of individual emails from I get one long email each day from each list with all that days emails in it. I find this much easier to manage and quicker to scan for anything of interest. I’ve found each of the lists are different, the topics they cover, how chatty the contributors are and how wide a subject range is allowed but all have helped me find out more about my ancestors.