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Getting started with searching Findmypast's records is easy. Our billions of individual records are divided into categories. Here's a summary of what you can expect to find in each of those collections and how they'll help your family research. Birth, marriage, death & parish records: This is one of the categories of records you'll probably use most often. These records, commonly known as BMDs, detail the most important events in your ancestors' lives and are essential for every family historian. Parish…

In this exclusive video masterclass, Findmypast's in-house military expert Paul Nixon explains how to uncover clues in your old military photographs, which in turn can help you further your family research.Using resources from both our military records and newspapers, Paul explains how you can piece together the remarkable stories of your British Army ancestors. Can't watch right now?: No problem. We've summarised Paul's three top tips below, so you can start deciphering your vintage military photographs at your leisure. 1.:…

To successfully build a family tree you'll need to use information on the family members you already know about to discover those you don't. The documents that help you do this can vary from prisoner lists to business indexes, military records to archived newspapers, but while those resources can be amazing for painting a picture of what your ancestor may have been like as a person, more often than not it's BMDs that allow you to identify them in the…

We've all been new to family history at some stage, and we'd be lying if we said we hadn't made (and continue to make) a few mistakes here and there. Luckily, genealogy is a marathon, not a sprint, and so there's time to learn from our errors and become better researchers along the way. Here are a few of the mistakes we made when we started out that we are sharing in the hope you'll avoid making the same ones.…