So long as you all promise not to have any ancestors from Manchester, I can give you some advice.
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www.ancestry.co.uk is good, but it costs money, unless you go and use it in the library in which case it's free (at least it is in Manchester, I assume it's the same everywhere else)
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www.freebmd.org.uk is very good for stuff before the 1920s, but useless for stuff afterwards, as the name suggests it'll cost you nowt to use.
- Your local version of
www.lancashirebmd.org.uk will prove invaluable, as it'll be the only site that'll give you the proper reference for your local register office, which will save you cash (getting it from the local office costs £7), and mean that the staff will hate your guts a little bit less than the family historians who don't have the reference. Find the version you're looking for here:
www.ukbmd.org.uk- If you need to buy certificates online and your local register office doesn't do it (their website will be part of the council's), then only use this site:
www.gro.gov.uk It'll cost you £7 if you have the GRO reference which you can get from ancestry or freebmd or your local county records office (if you prefer to do things the old fashioned way), it'll look something like: 8d 302. If you haven't got the reference it'll cost you a tenner and take longer. Be very wary of getting stuff from any other sites, in fact, just don't. You'll either get f***ed over on the price (£30, £40, £85!!) or they'll just take your card details and screw you for everything you've got.
- If you're going to get your certificates from the local register office, then what you need is: The name (
at the time), the year and quarter of registration, and the registration district. You can get them from the sites mentioned above. It'll probably cost you £7, although you'll probably have to wait a while, have them sent to you, or pay extra to get them quick.
I'm not going to go off on a big whinge listing page after page of things that people do which get on our tits, but just try and be clear, concise and only give them the relevant information. The amount of people who either come into the office, or write us letters, banging on and on about their ancestors, telling us everything we didn't need to know, yet not what we do, is truly phenomenal. It may be fascinating for you, but it's work for us, I seriously doubt that there's many people who've worked in a register office that don't loathe the whole idea of researching their family tree.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot: Don't trust the census, it's invariably wrong.
