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Aside from the documents you may not be able to locate on the Internet, the ones that are available online come with their own set of problems. For a start, do not expect to locate online sources for your ancestors by simply typing their name into a major search engine like Google, Ask Jeeves, or Yahoo! While this will sometimes yield results if you are very lucky or if an ancestor was particularly famous, most will need to be found using a site-specific search engine, which requires that you first locate the relevant website. This is best done by starting with a source such as GENUKI or Cyndi’s List, described earlier.

Specialist search engines allow you to search the website’s online indexes either by keyword, surname, date or place. They will often have been created by people who have manually transcribed words from the original documents into computer software. While this is part of the beauty of Internet research, allowing you to find what you are looking for instantly without the need to consult card indexes or scroll through every page of a document to find a particular name, databases create problems of their own. There are many errors in the transcriptions that can make locating the entry you want difficult. These errors are usually because the person doing the transcribing was not able to read the original old handwriting very well. For example, if you were looking for Adam Benny on the census, his name may have been wrongly transcribed into the computer’s index as something similar, such as ‘Alan Remy’, in which case it would be difficult to locate this entry using a name search. There are tips on how to overcome some of these common errors throughout the book under the relevant subject headings, but if you find it very difficult locating records that should be online, then you will have to consult the original indexes or records at the archives.