The best free websites to find your family

Bury-born actor Layton Williams, a familiar face from Strictly Come Dancing and BBC Three’s sitcom Bad Education, goes in search of his London roots in the latest series of WDYTYA?. If you also have L

More than 1.7 million records from the Channel Island of Guernsey have been added to family history website Findmypast (findmypast.co.uk). During the past year over four centuries of records have been

IRISH GENEALOGY Chris Paton Pen & Sword, 166 pages, £15.99 Over recent decades, Ireland has had to face the often horrifying treatment of its most vulnerable people, usually unmarried pregnant women a

Without question, every French genealogy research project begins with parish and civil registers. For some 250 years prior to the French Revolution (1787–1799), the Catholic Church in France, under a

ANTHONY ADOLPH is a professional genealogist and the author of 11 books PAUL BLAKE is the author of Tracing Your Insolvent Ancestors KATHERINE COBB is a member of AGRA based in Somerset JAYNE SHRIMPTO

The World Wide Web brought the internet into the public domain in 1993, and since then it has evolved beyond anything we could have imagined. We can buy clothes, food and all manner of items online, a