There will always be an England in the ancestry of millions of Americans. Here's how to get started tracing and celebrating your English roots. To start finding your English ancestors and discovering their stories, you need to begin with English records such as civil registrations, census returns, parish registers and probate records.
English records are remarkably complete and in many cases go back centuries.
But, because of the way records are organized and stored in England, it is actually easier to do research from this side of the ocean than in England itself. You can borrow these records through any of the church's 3,400 Family History Centers worldwide. For more on using Family History Centers, see the article in our April 2000 issue. Many genealogists have made the mistake of finding that an ancestor was born in England, finding someone by the same name there, and assuming that they've found their ancestor. A mistake like this can lead to years of tracing an incorrect family line.