Britain is in the midst of an intense race to build the most extensive database of recorded family history. As a result, what was once closely guarded by civil servants, librarians and obsessive genealogists is now easy to find online. It includes registers of births, marriages and deaths from 1837, census results from 1871, parish records and thousands of family trees. All have been put on the web in recent years and, in many cases, in recent months.
Ever since the government's attempt to put the 1901 census online collapsed under the weight of 3m hits in three hours, a growing band of specialist genealogy websites has sought to make up the lost ground.
Ancestry.co.uk, the UK arm of America's fifth-largest paid subscription site, MyFamily.com, rescued the 1901 census and won the right to upload other census material starting with the 1891 census and, most recently, records from the 1871 survey. This coup for Ancestry.co.uk has kept the grandaddy of genealogy websites out in front and able to claim a database of 175m names from the UK and Ireland, with 3.5m images of census, marriage and baptism records and thousands of parish and probate records.
However, the recent start-up 1837online.com has been closing the gap. It says it has completed transferring paper records of births, marriages and deaths since 1837 to its website, rivalling US site Rootsweb, which has done the same but without charging customers.
Then there is the family tree site Genes Connected, a spin-off from the hugely popular Friends Reunited, which last month claimed its one millionth member.
Its efforts over the past year have spurred interest in tracing family history, according to research by YouGov for 1837online. One in eight people are tracing family roots and 70% use the results of their research to create a family tree online.
Next month, many of this dedicated band and maybe some of the 46% of people who told YouGov they would like to trace their family tree are likely to attend the Family History Show in London, where expert genealogists will pass on tips on how to trace ancestors back to the Dark Ages.
Genes Connected is probably the fastest-growing user site. It is a series of family trees put on the site by thousands of amateur sleuths looking for connections with the past. They compile their trees from a mix of fireside chats with relatives, official data from other sites and, when they can't find what they want, the Family Records centre in London.
Steve Pankhurst, co-founder of Friends Reunited, puts the success of the site down to its open, democratic policy and lack of stuffy, academic attitudes. "It's one of those ideas that fits the internet perfectly. Until now, there's not been that many sites in the UK. What there has been are research sites that allow you to access old public records.
"Where Genes Connected is different is that we are not a research site in the purest sense because our data is not pulled from censuses. The other sites help you get to the information quicker, whereas the idea behind this was to put in the information you know or have pulled from the other sites and share it," he says.
The site is free to members who want to find a home for their family tree, but few want to leave it at that. Increasingly, they want to cross- reference with other family trees. And they can, with a search facility that allows users to check if other family trees hold names they are looking for. The only barrier is the £7.50 annual fee that pays for access to other users' email addresses. In the two years since it started, the site has acquired 1m members (though it won't say how many pay the subscription fee) and reckons to hold 11m names of dead ancestors, with some of the 40,000 to 50,000 names added every day stretching back to AD 1200.
Michelle Barker, the site's managing director, says the site has fired up a new generation of genealogists. "Prior to the internet it took so much time to physically track down the records. The only people who could do that were the well-off or people who had time on their hands. What the internet, and specifically Genes Connected, is doing is eliminating those barriers. The interest has always been there, but not everybody has always had the opportunity."
But how do site members know that the information about other people's ancestors are supported by physical records?
Jeremy Palmer, of genealogy specialists Achievements of Canterbury, credits the Genes Connected site with spurring increased interest in family trees and searches for ancestors, but argues web users can be misled.
"You can't rely on what people tell you. You must have access to original records like the 1901 census. The 1891 census has now been put on the Ancestry.co.uk site and each entry has been indexed as it is put in, which is marvellous, because you can find all the John Smiths with one press of a button. But that is fine provided it has been indexed accurately.
"For instance, we have discovered omissions and misspellings in the 1901 records, which the government put online. It's easy to make mistakes when a flourished "s" and a flourished "l" can look the same. I would always recommend people search using different spellings. So someone might want to search under Lawyer for someone called Sawyer."
His not-for-profit firm, which shares offices with the Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies, offers a service that can trace ancestors, using paper records, to the middle ages and, using DNA, determine whether your forebears came over with the Vikings or have Saxon blood.
"The main flaw in online searches is that there are few resources compared to the number still in libraries and church records. There are 12,000 parish registers in England & Wales. While much of that has been entered by the Mormon church, there is plenty still on paper." He points to the Family Records centre in London as the main starting point for anyone wanting to trace ancestors, though county libraries should contain similar information, especially births, marriages and deaths.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' (aka the Mormons) website www.familysearch.org also allows users to build their own family trees online as well as providing many records for people tracking ancestors on a more global scale.
But to get at source information such as records of births, marriages and deaths or census results in Britain, the costs start to rise steeply.
Ancestry.co.uk charges a flat rate of £29.95 a quarter or £69.95 a year. Charges range from 5p to 10p a search on 1837online.com, with a minimum £5 fee. It holds information held on civil registers, which have been collated into an A to Z index of all births, marriages and deaths from the coronation of Queen Victoria. The site inputs the names from all the pages so you can do a Google-type search for individuals.
Like Ancestry.co.uk, 1837online will have omissions and misspellings, but there has always been a cooperative spirit to tracing family history and this seems to have survived into the age of commercial sites charging for the service.
Pankhurst admits there may be mistakes in translation, but says his site has attracted few complaints - and these have been mainly from people who have been entered on the site without their agreement. "You are not allowed to enter details about living relatives without their permission."
· Family History Show, run by the Society of Genealogists in conjunction with 1837online.com, takes place May 1 & 2 at the RHS New Hall, London. For tickets, telephone 020 7553 3290. Includes lecturers for beginners costing £10.
Finding your roots
· Society of Genealogists also publishes the magazine My Family History.
· The Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies (01227 768664).
· Genuki is one of the main centres for genealogical records and is supported by Manchester and Newcastle universities.
· Familia provides a guide to what is available at public libraries, though only the large county libraries that hold genealogy records.
· Rootsweb.com (with support from the MyFamily group) provides a forum much like Genes Connected, though with free access to records of births, marriages and deaths
· Newsgroups offer a way to quiz others building family trees about shared ancestors.
· EveryGeneration.com is a resource for people of African, Caribbean or mixed ancestry.
· Anyone can search a Commonwealth War Graves Commission web site www.cwgc.org to find details of an ancestor who served in the first or second world wars.
· Cyndi's List of Genealogy web sites has more than 130,000 links.
· www.census.pro.gov.uk houses the 1901 census.
· Beginners can find help at the Federation of Family History Societies' First Steps in Family History at www.ffhs.org.uk/leaflets/faq.htm