Which is the best online family tree finder?

Question:

Which is the best online family tree finder?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: If your are in the UK, then www.ancestry.co.uk is a good place to start. They have all the census on line, from 1841 to 1901, Birth Marriage and Death registration records, Pallots Marriage and Baptism records and a whole load of other records that you can search. They also have message boards for places and surnames, very useful. If you pay for a yearly sub, you can search on there for as long as you like, save census records on your computer, put your family tree on, and various other things are available.

Then there is Thegenealogist.co.uk - Origins.co.uk - Familysearch - Genesreunited - all these I have found invaluable for researching my family trees.

There is no web site that will give you your family tree completed, you have to do all the work yourself.

Google is also good, just tap in the surname you are researching and see what comes up. There are many people who have their own personal trees online, one might have a connection to you. A search for the place your ancestors lived in, or were born in, might show a Family History group which would be helpful to you.
You could tap in Genealogy in Google and see what that shows, there are so many sites now.

Start with yourself and work backwards, get as much info from parents, grandparents as you can about what they remember about the family, like aunts, uncles, places of birth, years of birth, what they remember about their parents and grandparents names and places of birth, occupations and so on. This will give you something to go on when you start looking in the census details. The 1901 census (for the UK) is the best place to start if you are looking for your family in the UK.

If you are in the US I can only think of two, as my family are in the UK. They are Ancestry.com - and - Familysearch (The Mormon web site). Ancestry you have to pay for, Family search is free. As previously said, Ancestry are very good, they are adding to their online records all the time, be it in the UK or the US. I couldn't have got as far as I have without Ancestry or Familysearch.

I have done all my family research online, and have managed to get back as far as the 1700's, it's very addictive, and you could end up spending hours online researching, it's not just about names, it's also about where they lived, how they lived, what they did for a living etc.

Good luck and happy hunting.