Search Engines
There are several search engines on the world wide web – you probably have a favourite one already. They work in slightly different ways so you might want to try the same query in several search engines. Many people get started in family history by typing their surname into a search engine – this probably won’t get you very far, but you might find other people researching the same name, or come across some of the websites mentioned on the previous page.
These search engines will only search text in a web page, they cannot look inside a database such as the ones holding census or birth, marriage and death records. To search a database you have to go to the site where the database is (e.g. FreeBMD, ScotlandsPeople, FamilySearch, 1901 Census).
