Get more from your ancestry searches

Use our suggestions to track down missing ancestors and get more from your Ancestry.co.uk searches

FINDING THE RIGHT RECORDS 1 Focused searching

Searching all our records at once is extremely powerful, but it can give you too many search results. Consider searching categories, such as census or military records. Or, whenever possible, think about where and when you’re looking for your ancestors, and search within particular collections.

2 Recent collections

On our main search page ( www. ancestry.co.uk/search), look for ‘Recently viewed collections’ in the top-right corner. These links will take you straight back to the record collections you last looked at.

3 Recent searches

Slightly further down the page, on the left, you’ll find ‘Recent Searches’. This provides a list of the ancestors you last searched for. Click on them to go straight back to your search results.

4 Local datasets

At the bottom of the main search page is a map of the UK. Click within the map to see lists of record collections for any country. You can then use the options in the right-hand pane to see just the collections for a particular county (see step by step).

5 Find more records

We’ve created pages for our main categories to help you find more useful records. At www. ancestry. co.uk/census there are links to our census and electoral collections – as well as help for using those records. You’ll find a full list of these pages in the ‘ What’s Happening’ section of our homepage.

Click on the map to see record collections for any country