This chapter introduces in more detail the two websites I referred to in the last chapter – familysearch.com and ancestry.com. If you are not familiar with internet searching generally this will explain online family searching step by step. If you are new to family history it will explain the kind of information you can find, and the part the world wide web can play especially in basic genealogy based on vital public records.

What you learn will be of particular value when you get back a few centuries in the records, when spelling and other conventions differ a lot from today. It will also help you to get your family name ancestry right, given the possible pitfalls, as this is what your family history will build upon. First, I have included a section on surnames as these will be your focus for a while and a little background knowledge may make your early endeavours go smoother and create more interest.

Surnames

You may want to use surnames in one of two main ways. One name studies are popular, and these relate to a single surname usually on a worldwide or countrywide basis, regardless of individual family lines. If your name is uncommon, this can be an interesting kind of research and a fascinating hobby in its own right.

The other use of surnames is in the course of genealogy and family history research when the surname is your prime focus of interest. This may be a single paternal or maternal name tracked as far back as you can, or one or more of the many names you can trace by following marriage lines.

Many family historians have an interest in all these aspects of surnames. It may depend on how common or uncommon your family name is, a special purpose for the study (like verifying a family legend), or what most appeals to you as a hobby. You may wish to do a single name study as a one-off project, but take up family history as an ongoing project.

At the same time, whilst your main aim may be to trace your own surname as a single blood line as far back as possible – perhaps collecting as much additional information as possible after BDMs – you may have reason to stray along specific marriage lines for particular purposes. Maybe somebody famous lies along that tree, or a daughter emigrated, giving an interesting new line of investigation and so on. Or you may acquire a whole chunk of ancestry along a branch in the course of your research without having to do any hard work.

You can establish the presence of a surname on the internet easily by referring to the Roots Web Surname List, part of the main rootsweb.com site. You can also try the Guild of One Name Studies we cover in Chapter 5. Just as easily, you can search the two main websites we cover in this chapter. A multi-browser search engine such as Copernic (you can download this software free) will also produce a formidable response unless your surname is extremely uncommon.

It is as well to establish the approximate scale of internet presence of your family name quite early. This may influence your decisions about where to focus your research and will give important information about what has already been done.

Whilst there is nothing wrong with doing your own original research from scratch, you may decide that if you can obtain readymade ancestral relationships you may as well put your effort into other aspects of research. For example, you can study a particular date period, or branches of the tree that have not been covered, or find more information about the people and how they lived, or you could specialise in your own geographical area and contribute to a one name study.

You have a good chance of tracing back a surname to a time when most people could not write, let alone spell correctly. The educated – or at least basically literate – people who recorded names, such as parish clerks, relied on the sounds of names and were not too scrupulous about getting a phonetic match, let alone consistency from person to person with the same sounding name. In fact the very concept of a correct spelling would have been unknown.

So, not only will you probably find any number of variants, but further back the name may have been so corrupted that further tracking is impractical. This is the sort of background information we will cover before starting on web searches.