FAMILY TREE SEARCH: Genealogy tips

If your family tree has branched into a dead end, or an ancestor is proving elusive, never fear. Rob Beattie reveals 10 ways to improve your genealogy research

Genealogy free search
Paid-for services like Ancestry.co.uk offer excellent resources and great value for money to help you with all aspects of genealogy. However, there are also some good free alternatives, especially when you're starting out and uncertain how far you want to take your research. The National Archives , Family Records, the Free Census Project and GenUKI are all worth exploring.

HOW TO FIND PEOPLE ONLINE

The web is an incredibly useful tool for tracking people down, be they old friends or new work contacts. Here's SIX more ways to find someone's details online.

Try a combined search
There are various people-search engines available that combine two or more of the techniques mentioned above. Pipl provides a combined search covering social networks, member directories, court records and other deep-web sources. You can save time by using it, but you may need to augment it using other techniques if it doesn't come up with the goods.

HOW TO FIND PEOPLE ONLINE

The web is an incredibly useful tool for tracking people down, be they old friends or new business contacts. Here's 16 smart ways to find someone's details online.

Get started with Google
Google isn't brilliant for finding people, as personal details are often stored privately, but it's a good means of sourcing general information to get your search started. Be sure to enclose the name you're looking for in quotation marks, for example "John Smith", and enter relevant words such as the person's occupation, hobby or last-known location. You can also check that you've got the right John Smith by searching Google Images for visual results

DJ Wally & DJ Rocking Dave hosted The Marathon Party show, held during the 2007 Radio Gets Wild Broadcast Marathon. The show was aired live on Sunday, June 3rd 12 till 3pm from The Manor House, in the little village of Cossington, Leicestershire. 

Marathon 2007 Sponsored by SME Communications Ltd