Where can I find the earliest records of my relatives?

Question:(My Last name is Jones, and my mum's maiden name is thomas)

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: (My Last name is Jones, and my mum's maiden name is thomas)

To collect information on your family tree back to your earliest ancestors you begin with your parents and work backwards. List their names, birth date and birth place and if deceased, their death date & death place.
Then you collect this same information on their parents (your grandparents) and so forth. Each fact you collect on one generation will help you to find information on the next.
Birth, marriage and death records (as well as land deeds and many other types of records) can be searched (free) at county courthouses & county & state historical societies.
Rootsweb.com, familysearch.org and Genuki.com also offer many on-line resources for those wishing to research their family tree.

Kaye offered some good points.
I'd just like to add that when you work from YOU backwards, the goal is to locate YOUR SPECIFIC ancestors. Jones is a common name (needless to say) and Thomas is also.
Thinking in terms of looking for a surname is very counterproductive. If you learn, for instance, that your dad's father was born in a certain county in Alabama.. THAT is where you'll be looking for Jones. The same applies if you are working in UK records.
The factors in how much you find, is dependent on exactly who those ancestors were, as well as your own perserverance.

Have you asked your parents if they have any records? Traditionally many families have records dating back a while. On my dad's side I traced back to a direct ancestor who fought in the American Revolution, and even further back to the royal court of King James (the KJV of the Bible guy) in the early 1600s. On my mom's side just the other day I traced it back to about 1830, my ancestor was an Indian chief, met President James Buchanan, and was murdered by whites. Oh and on my dad's side my ancestors (the grandson of the Revolutionary War guy) supported the South in the Civil War and my family had slaves, hated Lincoln and were Freemasons. We have letters from them dating back to the Civil War where they talk about their spite for Lincoln.

Its pretty easy if you just connect the dots. Find out your grandparents names, when they were born, who their parents were, and just keep going back.

You can get an idea of where your ancestors came from, but this means very little unless you have traced the line back.

Naturally, we are looking at Wales for your Jones' line, but of course each generation will add new names from the mothers (2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great grandparents.... it doubles with each generation). Unless you can trace back to Wales in the very recent past, the likelihood is that you will have people from a great many places.

Most UK church records were not kept consistently before the late 16th century, so unless you find a "gateway" ancestor (one of noble birth whose ancestors will be on record further back), you are likely to hit a brick wall around the mid 1500s. At this stage, people travelled much less, as there was little industry likely to take people out of their, mostly rural, communities... so if you can trace them back to Tudor Wales, they are likely to be pretty close to where they lived when surnames first came into being (around the 14thC).

Jones and Thomas will be hard to trace, though certificates help avoid wrong-turnings in the first few generations back. During this search, you will hopefully discover more names, some of which may prove easier to trace with certainty.

No one can tell you that. When you do your genealogy, there is no telling where you will find records. Birth, death, and marriage certificates, census records, cemetery records, court, land, and probate records, last wills, church records, county records.... the list goes on and on of possible records, and YOU have to be the one to search them all for your family. No one else is going to do it for you. Even then, there is NO way of knowing what the earliest existing records of your family are and where they are at, and there is no guarantee that you will find those records. You find what you find, and all the while knowing in the back of your mind that there could still be something else, somewhere out there............

Everyone is giving you such wonderful advice! You can get all sorts of records from Ancestry.com. It costs though but I consider it to be well worth it. You have access to census records ending with 1930 & working back to 1790, military service records, social security's death records and on and on. I have saved so much time & money contacting various states & counties because the census record shows me the counties where my ancestors lived! You can also contact each county's genealogical society for assistance - they don't usually charge a fee but they do like a 'donation.'

Last name themselves will not help you. People did not have surnames until the last melennium. Jones like Johnson means son of John. You can imagine how many men named John had sons. Thomas is also a name that was given to people whose father's given name was Thomas.

See the link below from the most prestigious genealogical society in the U. S., The National Genealogical Society

http://www.ngsgenealogy.org/comconsumerp...

All the previous answers are wonderful! A piece of advice I can offer is this: Once you do start finding info, you'll need to approach the data w/ both SKEPTICISM & AN OPEN MIND. Don't take everything @ face value, but don't discard data if there are errors in it, either. I've come across many censuses & other sources of info that conflict, but that doesn't mean all the info is good, or that all of it is bad. The info recorded can be right or wrong (or a mix, which often seems to be the case). You have to weigh what you find w/ the info you already "know" (some of what's been passed down as "fact" can certainly be wrong, but the vice-versa may be true, so you need to be both open-minded & skeptical). Errors in documents might come from the initial recorder of info (priests, census enumerators, family members, etc.). Other times the people themselves give faulty data (for many various reasons--maybe they were distracted when the enumerator was there, or don't want to admit their true age [women probably more so than men], or were lying for more sinister reasons). If info's been transcribed, transcribers may also mess up. Be cautiously optimistic if you think you've broken through a wall; conversely, don't get too disappointed if you keep hitting that wall.

The earliest records for each relative will vary w/ each person in each family line. Sometimes parent(s)' names are known in 1 line but not the other. Typically, the women's (&/or her parents') names are the ones lost to history, especially in our more patrilineal western cultures.

Considering Jones & Thomas are your family surnames, it'll help to perform searches on the more unusual names, as it will reduce the number of hit you'll receive (which is a good thing w/ common names).