Useful sites
The Hold, Suffolk Archives, https://www.suffolkarchives.co.uk/ and information on using the website.
National archives has a guide to Census records and Free access to digital records while the Kew site is closed.
Dusty Docs contains parish records, as does FreeReg
FreeBMD has birth/marriage/death records, and FreeCen for census data.
Find My Past and its Record Sets – strengths are in older UK documents. Full catalogue here and Free Index.
Forces War Records and My Heritage
Ancestry – US-based but has UK wing. A strength is large number of more recent UK records (especially directories). See here for card cataloge and Free Index. It sub-site Fold3 has index here.
UKBMD – civil registration – also has lots of records, or links to, as does Cindy’s List and the GENUKI site.
Commonwealth War Graves Commission records for military history.
American Ancestors – website of the New England Historical Geoealogical Society has worldwide info – 22 countries and Mayflower 2020 website. Free index here. Also the Ellis Island website has searchable immigration records.
www.geni.com – tree building website (free for basic version) – linked to MyHeritage.
MyHeritage is an Israeli company set up in 2003 for sharing trees and photos in multiple languages. Catalogue here – free records are marked with a green “Free” tag.
FamilySearch is the online presence of the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. It has excellent obituary databases and is a single, shareable tree. It also has free access to US census. Their catalogue is here.
Genealogy for Kids – a site from “AAA State of Play” has some helpful pointers and further links.
US 1880 census in FMP records; US 1940 census in Ancestry; Naturalisation records 1840-1957 in Ancestry (collection 1193)
UK Census dates
Useful summary timeline of British History, or just the C19th.
Lost Cousins website.
Australia convict index 1788-1868 www.ancestry.com/search/collections/5517 and BMD on https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/8912/ https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/8913/ https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/8914/
Zeller’s algorithm to find what day you were born.
British Minesweepers and their sailors, can be found on www.harwichanddovercourt.co.uk/warships/minesweepers and a clickable index with linsk to photos and names of offices here but may be US only.
The following page https://www.hmy.com/researching-your-familys-history-from-ships-passenger-lists/ whilst not containing a search itself, has links to various site connected to ships’ passenger lists which can often be a useful way of tracking migration (especially when a family member seems to “disappear”).
Banns vs Bonds: A handful of documents could have recorded marriages. Couples intending to marry in the church published marriage banns on three success Sundays. But those who wanted to marry in a hurry and/or in private petitioned the church to wed using a marriage bond. Marriage bonds were written declarations of a man’s intention (or “allegation”) to marry a woman. A man who had proposed to a woman went to the courthouse with a bondsman and posted a financial bond indicating his intent to marry. The bond set a financial penalty on the groom and his bondsman in the case that the allegation should not occur. Bonds and allegations only exist for couples who applied by license, and don’t exist for couples who married by banns.