Starting your family history
Some websites for complete beginners
By Alice Cave
There are some useful websites you can use for family history. Some of them are free, for example, FreeBMD, which is an index to birth, marriage and death records, and the Family Search site, including the 1881 census and material drawn from parish records.
Ancestry is a site where you can access the census (the records cover every ten years from 1841 to 1901, and increasingly 1911 census records are included), birth, marriage and death indexes up to 2005, various military records and much more. If you go to a Nottinghamshire county library, it is free to use the website from the public computers. If you are visiting a Nottingham City library, then ask about free access to Find My Past.