I often get asked how much researching your family history costs. The honest answer is: it depends. Full subscriptions to the major genealogy research sites can start to add up. But you can go further than you might expect for nothing at all. There are some excellent free resources available to researchers, and most people starting out have no idea they exist.

Several of them are the first place I go. That remains true even after years of working with the paid platforms. Here are five worth bookmarking before you do anything else.

FamilySearch is run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The organisation has been microfilming and digitising genealogical records for decades. The result is an enormous, completely free database. It covers not just the UK but records from around the world. This was the only website that broke a long-standing brick wall in my family tree. It did so by giving me access to records in South Africa.

For British research, the 1881 census index on FamilySearch is particularly strong. It was one of the earliest large-scale indexing projects and remains one of the best. You will also find parish register transcriptions, probate indexes, and civil registration records. Some are available to view in full without paying anything.

The search can be a little idiosyncratic, and the interface takes some getting used to. But persevere, as the depth of what is available for free is remarkable. It is also worth knowing that FamilySearch has partnerships with several other platforms, so records you find indexed here may link through to images hosted elsewhere.

FreeCEN is a volunteer project that has been transcribing the census records for England, Wales and Scotland since the 1990s. It is free to search and free to view, with no registration required.

The coverage is uneven, some counties and census years are well represented, others less so, but where it does cover, it can be invaluable. It is particularly useful when you are hitting a wall on the paid platforms, because the volunteer transcriptions sometimes catch names that the automated indexes on Ancestry or Findmypast have mangled beyond recognition.

FreeCEN covers censuses from 1841 to 1891. For 1901 and 1911 the paid platforms are the main route, but for the Victorian censuses it is well worth trying FreeCEN alongside the subscription sites rather than instead of them.

FreeBMD does for civil registration what FreeCEN does for the census. It is a free, searchable index of births, marriages and deaths registered in England and Wales from 1837 onwards, built by volunteers transcribing the General Register Office indexes.

Civil registration began in England and Wales in July 1837, and the GRO indexes are one of the foundations of British genealogical research. FreeBMD gives you free access to a searchable version of those indexes, which means you can find the reference number for a birth, marriage or death record without paying for anything upfront.

Once you have the reference, you can order a certificate from the GRO directly. FreeBMD does not hold the certificates themselves, only the index entries. But finding the right entry first saves you ordering the wrong certificate, which is a more common and more expensive mistake than it sounds.

The General Register Office holds the official records of every birth, marriage and death registered in England and Wales since July 1837. Their online index is free to search, and it is considerably more useful than most researchers realise.

The GRO created their online database by re-digitising the original records directly rather than transcribing the existing index books, which means less error in the records. The birth index includes the mother’s maiden name for all registrations from 1837 through to 1924, not just from 1911 as many older guides suggest. Knowing the mother’s maiden name can confirm or rule out a candidate before you pay for a certificate. Bear in mind that maiden names were recorded as heard and are subject to the same spelling variations as any other name, so if you are not finding a match, try variants. For deaths, the index includes age at death for records from 1837 to 1957, which lets you calculate an approximate birth year before ordering anything.

Certificates can be ordered directly through the GRO website. Digital PDF versions are available for many records at significantly lower cost than the standard paper certificate, and delivery is faster.

GENUKI is not a record database so you will not find your ancestors on it directly. What you will find is an extraordinarily detailed, county-by-county guide to genealogical sources across the UK and Ireland: what records exist, where they are held, what survives, and how to access them.

It is maintained by volunteers, and it looks, frankly, like it was designed in 2003, because it largely was. Do not let that put you off. The content is solid, regularly updated, and genuinely useful in a way that no other free resource quite manages. When I am researching an unfamiliar county or trying to work out what records might survive for a particular place and period, GENUKI is often the first place I look.

If you are trying to find out whether parish registers survive for a specific village, what the local archive holds, or which record offices cover a particular area, GENUKI will usually have an answer. It is the kind of resource that takes five minutes to discover and saves you hours of searching in the wrong places.

One more thing

All five of these websites work best when you already know something about who you are looking for. A name, an approximate date, a county. If you are right at the beginning and are not sure where to start, have a look at my earlier posts in this series, particularly the one on where to actually begin and the one on five things to do before you start searching. Getting the groundwork right first makes everything else considerably easier.

And if you get stuck, on any of these platforms or anywhere else in your research, you know where I am.