Getting started on your research and what sites to use, here's my two pennyworth.
THE starting point must be to gather as much information from as many living relatives as you can. It really is amazing how much knowledge elderly aunts and uncles and even cousins have. Dont treat any of it as fact just yet but use it to point you in the right direction.
Then start with your own birth certificate. It will tell you who your parents are. IF you have a copy all well and good but if you havent its failrly easy to get one on line but it does mean that you are going to have to start paying out some money.
IMHO The best site for finding 20th century Births is findmypast (used to be called 1831online). You'll probably need to spend a Minimum of £5 but that will i think buy you 50 units.
findmy past wont show you actual birth certificates but it will give you access to the index. You will know your own date of birth so it should be fairly easy to find entry. using the information in the index, a copy of your birth certificate can then be ordered online from
http://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/certificates/. One certificate costs £7.00 (unless they have recently put the price up.
Ok having got your certificate and your parents names its now time to find a marriage certificate for them ( hopefully they were married.[smile]and before you and any older siblings were born.) If you already know when they got married then again its fairly easy to find an entry in the index on findmypast. If not then its a matter of working backwards in time from the eldest child. However going back 10 years is going to cost you 40 units. 1 for each quarter of each year.
It,s also probably easier to look for the least common name so if someone was looking for my wedding it would be difficult to find as there are lots of D Lewis's However there are very few S Shouler's so making it much easier to find.
Again having found the reference numbers in the index its a simple matter of ordering again on line.
Our parents marriage certificate gives us not only their names and ages but addresses and most importantly each of their fathers names and occupation.
Now that we know how old our parents were when they got married and the date of their marriage we can work out roughly when they were born.
Now its a matter of looking for their births on Findmypast and getting their birth certificates. This should give us the names of our grandparents.
We can then find their marriage in the same way as we found our parents.
And we keep following that process untill we get to before April,1901
Things can now get easier because we now also have Census information to help us.
I personally used Ancestry.co.uk to look at census information because most of it was there online before findmypast. Ancestry also allowed you to take out a yearly subscription which allowed you to view as many census pages as you liked during the period of your subscription. Thats a great help cause it allowed you to try and find your families entries using a number of different spellings.
its quite uncanny how many times you look for information suspecting it to be in one place but eventually you find it somewhere else.
Searching is an art. Even though Lewis is a fairly common name ive found people mis transcribing it. so if your expected search doesnt bring up the right family try searching on different items I.E I knew that George Lewis was born in 1881 in Herefordshire but couldnt find him so I did a seach for all the George's born around 1881 in Herefordshire and eventually found him and the rest of the family under a different spelling of Lewis. The trick is to not put to much information in the search criteria fields and to keep trying different combinations.
Ancestry isnt cheap at £70 a year but I found it incredibly useful.
One of its less used features is the family trees section. Here again you enter search criteria for an individual and if you are lucky you may find that somebody has already produced a tree with tha person on it.
However a word of caution, Never treat somebody elses information in a tree as absolutetly true, we all make mistakes so use it as a pointer to aid your own research.
Ok using ancestry and findmy past will get you back to 1837.
From now on it gets perhaps a little harder but a little cheaper because we can now look at parish records on the Mormon site.
http://www.familysearch.org/
and its FREE
Its tempting to use the search boxes on the home page but if you first click on the search tab on the top of the page and then click on the International Genealogical Index (IGI) menu item another set of seach boxes are shown which give you far greater flexibilty in searching.
Again its a matter of working backwards from people we know finding baptism or christening records, their parents names and then their marriages If you are really lucky some of your tree branches could get you back to the mid 16th century around 1550.
Now all this assumes that everything is straight forward but it is rarely so.
Some of us may have Irish ancestors that came here in the mid 19th century. Those are almost impossible to trace because of two things. Firstly many Irish records were destroyed in a fire ( cant remember the exact date ) and also many southern Irish ancestors were catholic and catholic records havent been made available to the mormons.
Ok that should give you a few pointers to get you at least started.
Its a fascinating journey and very rewarding as each new ancestor is revealed.