Some tips from my own experience

As mentioned in our home page, we don't pretend to be a 'one size fits em all'  genealogy site.  It just isn't that simple and it doesn't have to be that expensive. You can pay lots of money for information that is to some extent freely available.  But you will need to search around and you will need to follow some hunches and make some educated guesses.

My own research requirements were based around my own family in Australia with roots in Scotland, England and Wales.  In my own case, we emigrated from Scotland in 1958, so I knew that all my roots were Scottish, at least  to start with.  My wife's family are mainly 5th generation Australians with roots in Wales and England.  

What's in a name. There are some traditions used in naming children which generally aren't used today.  It can help you narrow your search dramatically if you can match the names to a known pattern.   In Scotland it was also common for people to be given a surname as a middle name to more identify who they were named after.  eg: in my own case I am named Andrew Fraser Hunter, after my esteemed maternal uncle, Andrew Fraser.   In Australia as in America the tradition evolved to name the first son after the father while in recent times children are more likely to be named after an entertainer or sporting identity.  Don't forget that the high level of child morbidity means that often the names aren't registered or sometimes they are used twice ie: where a sibling dies the next receives the same name (more common in England).

So let me start with an example of my paternal grandmother Elizabeth Wotherspoon. My father died 16 years ago and my mother is in a nursing home so very little anecdotal information was available. So I had to start with what I did know.

1. She married James Halliday Hunter sometime before my father's birth in 1917 (my father was a second child)
2. She died in 1978, at a good age, estimated to be in her 80's
3. My father once remarked, and it was noted, that the Hunter's had lived in Lanarkshire Scotland for many generations
4. People of my grandfathers time and class, did not travel extensively, unless they were in the army.

Therefore she most possibly would have been born somewhere near Lanark between 1890 and 1900.

By this stage of my research I had looked at many of the online resources and checked out the British Records Office   - and decided that it was going to cost me quite a some to track her down that way.  Eventually I discovered the FamilySearch web site run by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and what a marvelous free resource that is.  Note they offer a free family tree /pedigree program that works very well, I highly recommend it.  

Using the FamilySearch Online search facility, I searched out every Elizabeth Wotherspoon (don't forget to try all variants as often entries in official records or in transcribing to online can have errors) born in Scotland between 1880 and 1900. Well there was only one and she was born at Newarthill, Lanark, Scotland on 2 Sep 1892 - a perfect fit and therefore safe to assume that this is my grandmothers record.  The record  also showed Father Alexander WOTHERSPOON and mother Elizabeth SERVICE. It also provides exact document source information, should  I wish to order a birth certificate.  But for  my purposes, I had what I wanted - or so I thought.  I had in fact made a very fundamental error, I jumped to conclusions because I later discovered that this Elizabeth Wotherspoon died in 1918 where as my Elizabeth died in 1978.  Back to the drawing board.

More recently the BRO have set up the Scotland's People web site http://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/ and the charges are much more reasonable with longer periods available to search.  For around $15 I was able to track Elizabeth down and with a few more dollars I have many more relatives identified with marriage and birth certificates to boot.

I agree that it is not all conlcusive, but it is very convincing and certainly enough to now build the final evidence upon.