What websites are there that can take study of british family history back furth

Question:

What websites are there that can take study of british family history back further than the late 17th century?

Is it possible to go back further than this if your family were not nobility or gentry?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: A few sites have been transcribed, and put onto the web, but it depends on where your ancestors were.

Pete is talking rubbish, census returns started in 1801, and the first four were statistical records, so only a few detailed lists have survived in private collections. In 1841, the office of Statistics was merged with the new office of Births, Deaths and Marriages.

BDM start in 1837, so before this date you have to work on the Parish registers, which were transcribed by Phillmore and others.

The LDS church has a database, which is free to search, and contains millions of entries, but many have small errors in them, so you have to check the data with the real register.

The registers were copied into a bishops transcript, which is held in the record office of the Bishop, not the Parish, and this helps when the originals have been water damaged or lost in the war by bombing.

You have two big problems, one the Civil war 1640-1660 when records seem to disappear. And the enclosure of land, when your ancestors who were not throwing people off the land to make way for sheep - were being robbed and moving to dirty factories to prevent themselves from starving.

On the plus side, this is before the age of mass travel, so if you use tax records like hearth tax, Window tax and Muster rolls, all held at Kew in London. With these you may get back to the parish where your ancestors come from, then its hitting the records and a lot of luck to break into the pre Stuart records.

I have got back to 1500 with two names in my family, which??s when the real fun starts. One was Yeoman Farmers, so not too poor, but my Dads sides were stocking makers in Derbyshire, and the lowest rung of the social class. Having a very unusual surname helped me, but it is possible to research a working class family back into the medieval era. However English was only adopted in the reformation, so many of the records are in Latin, and my family were not rich, so were illiterate, so their names are the pronunciation of the surname translated by the parish priest who recorded the register. Surname spelling comes in around 1640, and was standardised in 1837....

Lots of luck