If you are interested in discovering your past relatives, there are many ways to achieve this task. If you are not sure if you want to devote the necessary time to such a task while asking yourself “How can I find my family tree?” The answer is simple; you will not discover facts about your ancestors unless you perform the research needed. Even if you believe that merely asking relatives will lead you in the right direction, you are partially correct however, that avenue will only lead you so far in your search for your ancestors.

The following are tips that can help you in finding your family tree:

Start with yourself. Contemplate the milestones of your life. Who was present to celebrate them? What relatives used to come over for dinner on Sunday? What relatives do you hear your parents speaking about in casual conversation? Annotate these facts and names and begin your search.

Create a system that works for you. Create Family group sheets and pedigree charts. The FGS sheet allows you to detail couples and their children. A Pedigree chart will simulate a tree with graphs and lined branching. This chart allows information to be added to the branches. Do not be afraid to purchase software programs that can save tons of time in adding all the information you gather. These software programs are not only time-efficient but also cost-efficient.

Remain logical. It is easy to become caught up in fantasizing about our past relatives. Focus on the facts that are backed up with documentation. Once you pinpoint particular relatives, you can begin performing your searches with Census records and public records online or at your local City Hall. Keep in mind that census records cannot be viewed for seventy-two years after they have been executed; some records are available for your viewing. Check vital records for death certificates, birth certificates and marriage certificates.

Work backwards starting with yourself. Annotate your own personal information then begin annotating information about your direct family such as your mother, father, brothers, sisters, cousins etc. Review past photos of when you were a child and ask questions about who are in the photos.

Allow other people to help you. There are generous people in abundance for help with genealogy research. Check with your local church, City Hall, library, genealogy societies and other organizations that store archived records.

Keep a journal of your genealogy project. You want to annotate your task with names and sources of everything you find. This way the information is stored in different places in case one source is lost, stolen or destroyed.

Do not give up. No matter how frustrating or tedious the task becomes, do not give up. Your family is worth searching for and the wonderful information waiting to be discovered is worth the sweat and toil utilized in finding them.

An ancestor’s will can be very useful for discovering or confirming family relationships where they are missing in other records – but even when they don’t give this information, they are an essential resource if you want to know more about how your ancestor lived. However, probate in England can be a complicated affair, and you need to know your way around the range of wills indexes and registers that exist both online and in archives.

Whether your ancestors were aristocracy, rich merchants, middle class tradesmen or working class labourers, it is always worth checking to see if a will was left. While it is far more likely that you will find wills within wealthy families, they do crop up within the lower classes more often than you might imagine. They can tell you a great deal about your ancestor’s family, his relationship with his family, friends and community, his religion, his possessions, land and property, and, quite often, his attitude to life. If you want a closer insight into your ancestor, then his or her will is probably the best kind of document you will ever find (apart from letters or diaries – but these are very rare finds).

But finding a will is not always that easy. Because of the way probate was organised there is no single index of wills up until 1858. This is because before this date wills were proved in the ecclesiastical courts, and depending on how much property you had, and where it lay, it might have been in the local archdeaconry courts, a bishop’s court (or consistory courts), or in the two archbishop’s prerogative courts (York or Canterbury).

If you are looking for a will before 1858 you will therefore probably have to search in several places, both online and in archives.

If you are searching online, the first steps you will probably take will be to use the National Archives site to search for PCC (Canterbury) wills, which you can download for a fee of £3.50, or Origins.net which has an index to the PCY (York) wills, held at the Borthwick Institute in York. You will need to take out a temporary or long term subscription to Origins. You can order a PCY will from the Borthwick Institute website for £5.00.

However, because you were probably fairly wealthy to have a PCC or PCY will, this is probably the least likely place to find a will if your ancestors were of more modest means. Therefore, the next best place to search online is Ancestry.co.uk or Origins.net, which both have searchable indexes of some consistory court wills and a few archdeaconry wills from various areas in the UK. Subscription fees apply to both websites.

If you find a will in these indexes, it should tell you where it is held – usually in a county or diocesan record office, and you will have to apply to this office to obtain a copy.

If you do not find what you are looking for in these indexes, then your next best step is to search indexes of wills in the diocesan record office that covers the area where your ancestor died. Diocesan record offices usually cover more than one county (Lichfield RO, for example, serves parts of Staffordshire, Leicestershire and Warwickshire), and you need to make sure you search the right one. Most of north Warwickshire falls within the Lichfield Diocese, whilst the southern parts of Warwickshire are mostly covered by the Worcestershire Diocese. Some county record offices hold wills indexes for the diocesan offices, and then you can usually order a copy of the will by post or online.

Lastly, check the wills indexes that are held in the county record office for the county your ancestor died in to see if any archdeaconry wills are held within that office. You should then be able to order the will to read at the record office. Quite often you will not be able to photocopy a will, but you should be able to photograph it after receiving permission from the record office staff.

If you are searching for a will after 1858, then your task is much easier. From 12th January of that year jurisdiction over wills was transferred to the new Civil Court of Probate, which have continued ever since.

To search for a will after this date you need to search the National Probate Calendar, which is available online at Ancestry.co.uk and at Origins.net. Once you have found a will here you can obtain a copy of the will from the Principle Probate Registry for a fee of £5.00.

While searching for wills and probate in England may seem complicated, especially for searches before 1858, it is basically just a case of making sure you have searched all the available indexes both online and at the appropriate local archives. It is well worth doing, for when you find a will you will instantly feel closer to your ancestor!

The first question people often ask is, ‘Where do we begin, when it comes to researching our family tree? In the first instance you have to make a start with the family members who are closest to you. It’s quite possible that some of your relatives will have little or no interest when you first approach them, but it is always worth the effort to try to enthuse them and get them on board. There will almost certainly, however, be others who already share your enthusiasm and they will be encouraging. One of the first things you can do is to look for the Family Bible, to help you trace your family tree. If this has been regularly updated over the years it could give you a very useful snapshot of important events in earlier generations.

Another very useful source of information should not be overlooked as most families have pieces of memorabilia of various kinds stored away. There will be photographs going back to the early 19th Century if your ancestors had access to photography. There may even be portraits going back even earlier if they had the artistic talent or leisure to exercise it. There will be diaries and letters from family members who travelled overseas for a variety of reasons. Some of your forbears may well have been posted overseas in times of war; while others might well have been caught up in a gold rush frenzy, in the States or in Australia. Others will have gained medals, citations and awards. Every document or artefact will have a history and an association to help you throw more light on the kind of people they were and the sort of lives they lived.

Record Offices provide a mine of information. The provisions are different from country to country but the strong probability is that there will be lots of archives accessible to you locally and nationally. The majority of primary material will be housed in record offices, libraries and museums. There are Family History Centres set up by the L D S Church in North America, in the British Isles and around the world. County Record Offices are useful if you are researching family links associated with a specific geographical area. You might also need to check out what is available in the National Archives located at Kew in England at some point.

Record Offices also have their online facilities on site. However, one can always investigate online options at home or in an internet café. You will find lots of websites to help you find the advice you need to get started. You may well find private websites offering information about members of your own extended family simply because so much research has already been undertaken and is now in the public domain and so easily accessible. You can also join a chat site or forum and link up with fellow researchers.

Finally, Census Returns are a useful source of information for your family history research. They were first instituted in the late 18th Century in America, and in the early 19th Century in Great Britain. The Union States first held one in August 1790. Twenty years later the first one was held in Great Britain. However it wasn’t until the Census of 1841 that genealogists in the United Kingdom could look up family details on the Census returns. Of course from time to time you will find mistakes simply because no human-sourced record will ever be entirely free from errors and so census returns have to be checked against other reliable primary sources to be sure your findings are correct and reliably substantiated whenever possible.