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Check our family history surname directory for hundreds of thousands of common and some rare surnames. If you have a rarer surname in your ancestor line this can be a way of making rapid progress. With a less common surname you can make rapid progress in weeks, days or even hours. You can contact other family historians with the same surname through our site and collaborate on researching your family history
Attending your local genealogical society can be an excellent way of meeting other researchers. Some societies and family history centers have book and publication exchange schemes to help you get access to a wider range of family history support resources
Marriage licenses are great sources of family history information. They usually show ages, parents, witnesses and in some cases where the bride, groom, and parents were born and their occupations. Death certificates are also useful. They show death dates, birth dates, parents, who reported the death, but also often contain other key information like place of residence and much more in depth family history information like causes of death
In both the US and the UK there are volunteer based initiatives to digitize and index Birth, marriage and death records for family history purposes. In the US you can refine your family history search by county, state and names. In the UK you can access the index of births, marriages, and deaths from England and Wales from 1837 to 1983. The free BMD database includes over 68 million family history records.
