Last time, I began a review of online genealogic records for the United Kingdom, starting with England and Wales.

I noted that in England and Wales, the General Register Office (GRO) is the government agency responsible for civil registration—the recording of vital records such as births, marriages, and deaths (BMD)—and that Ancestry.com provides free access to many indexes for this information.

As noted, the actual records are not available online, but once the desired information is found in an index, the civil records themselves may be ordered from the GRO (https://www.gro.gov.uk/gro). I also pointed out that church records for England and Wales are available for a price at Ancestry.com and at findmypast (http://www.findmypast.co.uk).

As is the case for all searches, it is important to know the specific location where your ancestor was born or lived. Most of the various counties, townships, and other political subdivisions of England and Wales have a wealth of records, but to make the most of them, you need to know where to look.

As with any information about ancestral towns, you must make use of family knowledge or documents, cemetery records, and tombstones, etc. If those don’t identify the ancestral town, you must use methods previously described to search U.S. censuses that give dates of immigration for your ancestors, and then search for passenger manifests and/or naturalization records that identify a town of origin. Once the town is known, enter the town’s name in any Internet search engine to find the county it lies in.

Then try the free Mormon site FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org) or the subscription site Ancestry.com and search for records for the town. You will not find every UK/Wales town at those sites, nor complete records for those that you do find, but some information is available.

If you need to search further, a group of websites under the common identifier GENUKI (Genealogy for the United Kingdom and Ireland, http://genuki.org.uk/big/eng or http://genuki.org.uk/big/wal) has information grouped by the counties of England and Wales (and Ireland and Scotland, to be discussed later).

A shire is a traditional term for a division of land, once used in the UK. Older records may refer to shires, while records beginning in the 19th century are grouped by county. At GENUKI, you’ll see a list and a map of English counties.

The volume of data available precludes my writing about every type of record for every shire, county, or parish, but I’ll choose a typical one and go through the process of locating information. For others, you’ll have to surf the site to see what you might find.

Let’s say your ancestor was from the county of Essex in eastern England. Go to GENUKI’s English site (http://genuki.org.uk/big/eng) and click on either the image of Essex on the map or the name Essex in the list.

You’ll be routed to a page where you’ll see links to categories like: Archives and Libraries; Biography; Census; Church History; Church Records; Genealogy; Names, Personal; and Societies. At the bottom of the page is a link under the heading “Towns and Parishes,” which leads to an alphabetical listing of towns in Essex County, many of which have further links to town-specific information.

Even if there is no direct link to your town of interest, you may still be able to find information at the other general links. The link for “Societies” will lead you to the site for the Essex Society for Family History, which may provide help in your search.

This example for Essex County is essentially mirrored for the other counties of England and Wales. If you have a specific interest, I encourage you to go to the suggested links and research your ancestral county and town.

I must warn you: You may have luck on Ancestry.com or FamilySearch and find an image or transcription of an actual record. However, it’s important to note that, typical of England/Wales searches, the result of your search will usually not be an image of an actual birth, marriage, or death record, but a process by which you can identify the record and how to order it, for a price, depending on the information and the source.

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