How to make a family tree for Free in the UK

It's 2am, its Friday night, and I have to wake up with my daughter in four hours. I have spent the last 6 hours in front of a PC. My eyes are red and sore. I type out the email, "Mum, I found the missing link to our family on the female side.. going to bed". Why would I put myself through this? Am I a masochist? No I love researching my family tree. It excites me, it wakes me at 4 am in the morning with a random thought. Researching your family tree can be an all consuming project once you get started. So the answer is no, it is not always easy. Nothing worthwhile doing ever is!

The second question most people ask me is, "are there lots of free documents on the internet, do I have to spend any money". The answer to that question is yes there are documents and no you don't have to spend lots of money, but you should spend some if you want to get things moving. However I thought I would put together a bit of a guide to doing research for free in the UK.

Ok the good news for UK residents, is that potentially you could complete a lot of research without ever spending a penny. This is because their is a central set of records and indexes, many of which include vital information, such as births, marriages, deaths, censuses, etc. Most of these have a certain amount of free information available about them. Now you cannot get everything without spending some money, but you can probably get away with spending very, very little to start your family tree!

For example access to the birth indexes for the UK between 1837 and 1907 is available free online, with pretty much full coverage! These indexes include the quarter in which the birth was registered, the year, and the mothers maiden name, absolutely invaluable information. The marriage indexes have also been covered quite well, this means you can find out in what quarter of which year people were married, and this can be used to find partners, and maiden names assuming you know one part of the family.

What you cannot get is a copy of the actual certificates for free, the indexes will allow you to order them from the central records office, or if you have relatives in Scotland you can get pretty much any record online, for a cost of about £4! I wish all my relatives came from Scotland!!! If you have to get copies of certificates from the records office you can expect to pay around £7 if you know everything about the registration (i.e. the index number), or £10 if you don't.

However it is not always necessary to have the certificate to gain all the information you need!

The best websites to get free information are:

The Church of the Latter Day Saints (LDS) - The church have an large set of records in the UK, that they have gathered from churches and parishes. Much of this is available for free. They have birth, marriage and death records, copies of the censuses available, all for FREE! However you may find at times some information is missing, and sometimes you will be informed that there is a record available but it hasn't been transcribed, in which case you will have to ask them to provide a copy. This can be done by visiting the local LDS center, this is all explained on their website.

FreeBMD - Is a free site that has a large number of the indexes from the UK transcribed, it's done by volunteers and is excellent! You will find some inaccuracies, largely due to the fact that many registers were handwritten, so reading peoples handwriting can be very difficult. They are also doing more projects to transcribe the censuses and other documents, although these are less well transcribed right now: