Family History

You can really turn the power of the internet to your advantage with time-saving automated searches, where computers do all the searching for you.

By looking at all the ancestors and relations in your family tree, the Genes Reunited website can search its database for likely matches in other people's family trees. When it looks like a common relation has been found, you'll be sent a 'Hot Matches' email straight to your inbox without you having to lift a finger. All you'll need to do is decide whether you want to contact the person whose tree has been matched to yours. This also keeps you up to date with all the new trees being created (around 30,000 new trees are added to the site each week).

TIP: When searching for relatives or using hot matches, it's worth remembering that place names change over time: counties are renamed, borders change and villages are subsumed into cities. For example North-East Wales changed from Denbighshire and Flintshire to Clywd and back again in 30 years, but with different county borders each time.

If there isn't an exact match with a place of birth, it's worth thinking if the two locations are actually very close together. If you are unsure, an online mapping system such as Google Maps, Microsoft's maps on Live Search and Multimap.

If you don't have time to look at your hot matches email, there is a section on the Genes Reunited site where all of your potential hot matches are listed. You can click on each one and compare the details for a relative in your tree with the proposed hot match. In addition there is an automated "Record Matches" tool. This looks through 100 million original census records to locate the ancestors in your family tree.