www.ancestry.com is fertile ground for your research, particularly in the United States, but records are widely held, and many are free to access by way of their website.
If your ancestor may have emigrated to the United States, the American Family Immigration History Center at Ellis Island provides a wealth of information, including a surname index of their passenger lists. See www.ellisislandrecords.org.
Ancient Faces is an innovative site where you will find old photographs posted for identification - www.ancientfaces.com.
The British Library Online Newspaper Archive and the Colindale Newspaper Archive in North London are well worth exploring for specific events involving those of your ancestors who may have hit the headlines, or been otherwise reported. These websites may be found at www.uk.olivesoftware.com and
The names and often next of kin of soldiers who perished in the two World Wars may be found at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website, yard.ccta.gov.uk/cwgc.
www.cyndislist.com is the place to go for a comprehensive source of genealogical information - if it's on the net, Cyndi's list will have a link to it.
The Family Search Internet Genealogy website, at www.familysearch.com, is best known for its International Genealogical Index (IGI), which, whilst not comprehensive, contains an enormous searchable database of baptisms, marriages and burial records for most parishes in the days before civil registration. Taken from many sources, including parish registers, the IGI is an invaluable reference source for genealogists as you try to narrow the search for your ancestors.
freebmd.rootsweb.com is the result of the efforts of a team of volunteers, intent on creating a searchable index of all births, marriages and deaths recorded in England and Wales between 1837 and 1900. Although in its early stages, the website contains over one million surnames already and if you strike lucky, could save you a lot of time trawling the book indices or fiche year-by-year to find your ancestor's name.
The www.genealogy.com and www.gengateway.com sites are well worth looking at, being full of information and links. In particular, the surname forums are worth joining and are a good way of meeting distant cousins you did not know existed!
GENUKI at www.genuki.org.uk is the foremost UK reference point for searching geographically. Home in on a county and find masses of information about its locality, history, family history groups and so on.
origins.net is an expanding database of certain English genealogical records and is required reading if you have ancestors who lived in Scotland, where parish records of baptisms and marriages, civil records of births, marriages and deaths as well as 1881, 1891 and 2001 Census details are all available at this site.
The Public Record Office, www.pro.gov.uk, contains a mass of important documents for the family history researcher. Find them at
As well as its huge number of surname lists and mailgroups and references to other sources, www.rootsweb.com hosts numerous other sites, such as individuals who have published their own family trees.
This is not a comprehensive list, but these sites will assure you comprehensive coverage!