Family History - Ancestry Website

Information about how to access and use the Ancestry website to help trace your family history.

You can access the Ancestry website free of charge from your local Solihull library

The site is very easy to use but you can sometimes find that you spend a long time browsing through lots of irrelevant records.  Staff at Solihull Heritage & Local Studies Service have compiled some help sheets (see attachments, right) that can help you get the most out of Ancestry when using library computers. 

Please note that we subscribe to Ancestry Library Edition, which has a slightly different layout from ancestry.com and ancestry.co.uk so the help sheets may not apply to these sites.

Useful tips

You will get more relevant results if you search specific records rather than doing a general search from the Ancestry home page. 

Our help sheets explain how to search the census records and the births, marriages and deaths indexes.

Ancestry help sheets

For use with Ancestry Library Edition (from library computers). See the attachments section on the right of the page for copies you can download of our help sheets on:

• Births, marriage and death indexes
• Searching census records by name
• Browsing census records by place
• Printing images from Ancestry