If your family tree has roots in England — or anywhere across the British Isles — you are in excellent company. Around 50 million Americans claim British or English descent, with tens of millions more tracing ancestry to Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. For many of these families, the trail leads, sooner or later, to London: the great port city through which generations sailed, settled, struggled, and thrived.
Tracing that trail can feel daunting at first. Records are scattered across centuries, counties, and continents. But the good news is that England has some of the finest genealogical archives in the world — and a growing number of them are freely available online. This step-by-step guide will walk you through exactly where to start, what to look for, and how to bring your British ancestors back to life.
Step 1: Start With What You Know
Every family history begins at home. Before you open a single database, sit down with the oldest relatives you can reach — by phone, video call, or in person — and ask them everything they remember. Full names (including maiden names), approximate birth years, the county or town in England they came from, the ship they or their parents sailed on, and any family stories, however fragmentary, are all invaluable starting points.
Then gather your documents. Birth, marriage, and death certificates — both British and American — are your primary sources. Old passports, naturalisation papers, letters, and photographs can reveal maiden names, addresses, and dates that no database will give you. Write everything down in a simple family tree chart before you go any further. Knowing what you already have stops you chasing records you don’t need yet.
Step 2: General Register Office (GRO) Records — Civil Registration From 1837
Civil registration of births, marriages, and deaths in England and Wales began on 1 July 1837 — one of the most important dates in British genealogy. From that point forward, every birth, marriage, and death was supposed to be registered with the local register office, and copies were sent to the General Register Office in London.
If your ancestor was born, married, or died in England or Wales after 1837, a GRO certificate almost certainly exists. You can order official certificates directly from the GRO Online Certificate Ordering Service at gro.gov.uk. Each certificate typically costs a few pounds and will be posted to you (or emailed as a PDF).
Before you pay for a certificate, check the free index at FreeBMD.org.uk. Volunteers have transcribed millions of GRO index entries, allowing you to confirm the right person and reference number before ordering. It is one of the most useful free tools in British genealogy.
Step 3: Census Records (1841–1921)
England and Wales has conducted a census every ten years since 1801, and from 1841 onwards those censuses recorded names, ages, occupations, and birthplaces. The National Archives releases each census to the public 100 years after it was taken — meaning the remarkable 1921 census, the most detailed yet, became available in January 2022.
FindMyPast.co.uk holds the largest collection of UK census records online and is the exclusive digital home of the 1921 census. A seven-day free trial gives you a generous window to search for your family. Each census return will tell you the address where your ancestor was living on census night, their age and occupation, their relationship to the head of household, and — crucially — their county or country of birth. This birthplace is often the clue that leads you back one more generation.
Work backwards: start with the most recent census in which your ancestor would have appeared, then step back decade by decade. You will often watch an entire family grow, move, and change across the Victorian and Edwardian eras.
Step 4: Parish Registers Before 1837
Before civil registration began, the Church of England kept the official record of life’s great events: baptisms, marriages, and burials. Parish registers survive from as early as the 1530s in some cases, though most begin in the 17th or 18th century. For anyone with English ancestry before 1837, these registers are essential.
Many London parish records are held at the London Metropolitan Archives (LMA) on Northampton Road in Clerkenwell — open free to the public. Diocese-level records, including those for the historic Diocese of London, are also held at Lambeth Palace Library in Southwark, the official archive of the Church of England.
Online, FamilySearch.org (run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) has digitised and indexed an enormous number of English parish registers entirely free of charge. Ancestral Atlas is a useful tool for mapping surviving registers by county and date range, so you can quickly see whether records exist for your ancestor’s parish before you travel or order microfilm.
Step 5: The National Archives, Kew
The National Archives at Kew in southwest London is the official archive of the UK government and holds records stretching back to the Domesday Book of 1086. For family historians, the most useful collections include:
- Wills and probate records — before 1858, probate was granted by church courts; after 1858, by the Principal Probate Registry. Wills can reveal family relationships, property, and personal details that no other source provides.
- Military records — service records for World War One and World War Two soldiers, pension records, medal rolls, and campaign records are held here. Many WW1 service records were damaged by bombing in 1940, but surviving records and pension files are digitised on FindMyPast and Ancestry.
- Land tax records — useful for tracking property-owning ancestors from the 18th century onwards.
- Naturalisation papers — if your ancestor was a foreign national who became a British subject, their naturalisation file may be here.
Browse the National Archives’ free online catalogue at discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk before your visit. Many documents can be ordered as digital downloads without travelling to Kew at all.
Step 6: London-Specific Records
If your family came from London itself — or passed through it — several specialist resources are worth knowing about.
The London Metropolitan Archives holds records for the historic county of Middlesex and the City of London, including electoral registers, rate books, coroners’ records, hospital records, and poor law records. Admission is free and the reading room is welcoming to visiting researchers.
The Huguenot Library in London is the place to go if you suspect French Protestant ancestry — tens of thousands of Huguenot refugees settled in Spitalfields and Soho in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, and their descendants are scattered across the English-speaking world today.
The East End was home to successive waves of immigration: Irish families fleeing the Famine in the 1840s, Ashkenazi Jewish communities from Eastern Europe in the 1880s and 1890s, and later arrivals from across the Empire. If your ancestors were part of any of these communities, specialist archives — including Jewish genealogy societies and the Irish Family History Society — hold records that general archives do not. Each London borough also maintains its own local archive, and many hold rate books, school records, and workhouse registers that can flesh out an ancestor’s daily life.
Step 7: DNA Testing to Break Through Brick Walls
When the paper trail runs cold, a DNA test can open unexpected doors. AncestryDNA has the largest database of British-American matches in the world, making it the best first choice for connecting with cousins who may hold the family documents you are missing. MyHeritage DNA has a strong European database and is particularly useful for matching relatives who remained in Britain. FamilyTreeDNA offers Y-DNA testing, which traces the direct paternal line through surnames, and is invaluable for establishing whether two families with the same surname are actually related.
DNA is not a magic solution — matches still need to be correlated with paper records — but it is an increasingly powerful tool for breaking through the brick walls that stump even experienced researchers.
Step 8: Planning a Heritage Trip to London
There is nothing quite like walking the streets your ancestors walked. If you are planning a heritage trip to London, consider building your itinerary around the places that matter most to your family history.
Visit the London Metropolitan Archives in Clerkenwell to see the original records in their historical context — there is something profoundly moving about holding a register open at your great-great-grandmother’s baptism entry. Take a walk through Spitalfields or the East End if your ancestors were part of the immigrant communities who shaped that neighbourhood. The Museum of London (now relocating to West Smithfield as the Museum of London Docklands) brings the city’s social history vividly to life.
If your ancestors came from outside London — a village in Kent, a market town in Yorkshire, a Cornish fishing port — consider extending your trip to visit the ancestral county. Local record offices are invariably helpful to visiting researchers from overseas, and the experience of standing in the churchyard where your family is buried is one that no website can replicate.
Free Resources: Your Quick-Start Toolkit
- FreeBMD.org.uk — free index of England & Wales births, marriages, and deaths from 1837
- FamilySearch.org — free access to parish registers, census records, and much more
- FindMyPast.com — the largest UK census collection online; seven-day free trial available
- TheGenealogist.co.uk — strong for tithe maps, trade directories, and non-conformist records
- British Newspaper Archive (britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk) — millions of digitised historic newspapers; invaluable for obituaries, court reports, and local news
- Discovery catalogue (discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk) — free search of the National Archives’ holdings
- London Metropolitan Archives (cityoflondon.gov.uk/lma) — free public access to London’s historic records
Tracing your British and English ancestry takes patience, but it rewards that patience generously. Every certificate you find, every census entry you locate, every parish register entry you read brings a real person — your person — a little closer. London has been at the heart of English life for two thousand years, and the records to prove it are waiting for you.
Subscribe free to Love London for weekly stories about the London your ancestors knew — the history, the hidden streets, and the people who made this extraordinary city. Click here to subscribe — it’s completely free.