Ancestry/Genealogy

I'm Australian, of English/Scottish/French ancestry on my mother's side, and Dutch/German on my father's.

I found the UK records a dream to work with. The census is particularly helpful – in Australia, we don't have access to actual names of families; it's used purely to count numbers, whereas the British census not only had information about our family members, I found it interesting to look at the professions of their neighbours to get an idea of the kind of areas they lived in. And having everything centralised is wonderful – I couldn't trace my father's family in Germany, because the records there aren't centralised, and I'm not certain where they came from. Centralisation of records should be compulsory throughout the EU!

I will also need to get professional help sometime with the French records – I know my ancestors were Huguenots, but I can only trace back with certainty to 1789, about 100 years later than I would need if I want to connect the family to the original French immigrants, but I haven't been able to access the necessary records – it's possible they're kept by the French Huguenot church in Soho, but I can't get them online.

The Scottish records are reasonable, but I found that there are a lot of gaps in the records, and it's a shame they won't allow access to people like Ancestry to help them get their records into better order.