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This was formed in 2003 through a merger of the Public Record Office and the Historic Manuscripts Commission (HMC). TNA is the principal repository for British national records, which are referred to constantly in this book. Among those records that are used the most by family historians are censuses and Prerogative Court of Canterbury wills and records relating to soldiers and sailors.

The main task of the HMC, also called the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, is to catalogue collections of records outside TNA. Its published reports cover a vast array of manuscripts in public and private hands, from the House of Lords to Longleat, and including businesses, solicitors’ papers, county record offices and so on.

The indexes to the printed reports can make surprising and rewarding ‘lucky dip’ searches, and the HMC’s on-going work is indexed centrally in the National Register of Archives, accessible via TNA’s website. This includes a search facility for those personal names and topics that have been indexed within the records and leads direct to contact details for the relevant archive.

TNA’s website provides a great deal of information about how to get to and use the archives and its records, and also enables you to download any of its many very informative information leaflets which will tell you more about many of the most commonly used records. Look at the website before you go to TNA, not least because you can pre-order the documents and have them ready and waiting for you when you walk in. The website also contains some very useful databases, particularly the main catalogue, www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/catalogue, which you can use as a short cut for specific searches or as a general trawl for references to the names that interest you. You are highly likely to find them cropping up in categories of documents you never expected, or even categories of documents you had never heard of before. Stella Colwell’s The National Archives, (TNA, 2006) is geared specifically to genealogists.

TNA also maintains Access to Archives, an online catalogue to material held in many British archives, including the county record offices. Once you have found material that interests you it also provides links to the Archon Directory www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/archon, to give you full contact details for the archive concerned.

In the old days censuses were kept at Portugal Street, and General Registration records of birth, marriage and death were kept at Somerset House, then St Catherine’s House, and then the Family Records Centre. Now all are on file/fiche at TNA, and are increasingly available online.