Start with the family around your table

Before you subscribe to anything or type a single surname into a search box, talk to the people who remember. Your oldest living relatives are living archives, and the details they hold — a grandmother's maiden name, the street where a great-uncle grew up, why a branch of the family moved from a Welsh mining village to Coventry — are often impossible to find in any record alone.

Ask open questions rather than yes-or-no ones. "Where did you live when you were small, and who else lived there?" will tell you far more than "Were you born in Leeds?" Prompt with photographs, objects and old addresses. If they are willing, record the conversation on your phone — voices carry far more than facts.

Worth gathering while you can:

• Full names, including maiden names and nicknames used in the family
• Approximate dates and places of births, marriages and deaths
• Occupations, trades and employers
• Religious denomination — this decides which registers to search
• Moves between towns, counties and countries, and roughly when
• Military service, migration, and family sayings or legends

Treat every memory as a clue rather than a fact. Dates drift, names get confused between cousins, and family stories grow in the telling. That is not dishonesty; it is simply how memory works.

Certificates: the backbone of your tree

Civil registration of births, marriages and deaths began in England and Wales in 1837, in Scotland in 1855, and in Ireland in 1864. From those dates onwards, certificates become your most reliable evidence. A birth certificate names both parents, including the mother's maiden name, and gives the father's occupation and the family's address. A marriage certificate names the fathers of both parties and often the witnesses, who are frequently relatives. A death certificate gives age, occupation, cause of death and the informant.

Certificates cost money, so be strategic. Search the indexes first — they are arranged by quarter of the year, so note the quarter as well as the year — and order only the certificates that will actually move your research forward. A useful rule: order a certificate when it will confirm a relationship or unlock a new generation, not simply because you have found a name.

Census records: a snapshot every ten years

A census has been taken in Britain every ten years since 1801, but 1841 is the first that names individuals. Records are closed for a hundred years, so the most recent available census is 1921.

Each decade gives you something slightly different. The 1841 census rounds adults' ages down to the nearest five years and only tells you whether someone was born in the county. From 1851 onwards you get relationship to the head of household, marital status, a precise age, occupation, and the parish and county of birth. Later censuses add detail — the 1911 returns, for instance, record how long a couple had been married and how many children had been born and survived.

Censuses are wonderful because they let you follow a family across decades: watching children appear, occupations change, addresses shift, and elderly parents move in. Always read the whole page, not just your ancestor's line. Neighbours are often relatives, and a sibling living three doors away can break a deadlock.

Searching sensibly, and keeping good notes

Spelling was fluid and clerks wrote down what they heard, so a family could be "Smythe" in 1861 and "Smith" in 1871 without anyone thinking it odd. Search variations, try initials, and use wildcards where a database allows them. Small age discrepancies are entirely normal.

A few habits will save you years:

• Work backwards, one generation at a time, and verify each fact with a second source
• Keep a research log recording what you searched, when, and what you found — including the searches that found nothing
• Write down where each fact came from, so you can revisit it
• Back up your digital files and label scanned photographs with names and dates while someone still knows
• Remember that before 1837 you rely on parish registers — baptisms, marriages and burials — held in county record offices and archives. A baptism date is not a birth date

When you meet a brick wall

Every family historian does. Common culprits are very common surnames, families who moved into a large city, illegitimacy, adoption, and records lost to fire or flood. Try widening the search rather than pushing harder at the same name: look at witnesses at weddings, godparents at baptisms, and the neighbours listed around your family. Search siblings, because a brother's or sister's record sometimes names the parents you cannot find elsewhere. Local newspaper archives, workhouse and poor law records, military records and nonconformist registers can all fill gaps.

Turning names back into people

The best family history is not a list of dates but a series of lives. An agricultural labourer, a millworker, a shopkeeper's daughter, a wartime bride — each had a daily routine, a wage, a street, a set of worries. Set what you find against the history of the place and period, and the names will start to breathe.

Then share it. A wall chart in the hall, a folder of stories, a recording of a grandparent talking about their childhood — these turn your research into something the whole family can hold on to. Do handle living relatives' details and difficult stories with care, and ask before publishing anything sensitive. Family heritage is not only the grand and famous; it is the ordinary, stubborn, resilient people who got you here.