@Cyclops is your man for this!
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I've done Ancestry and then Find my Past - at the moment I'm finding the latter better.

Ancestry is good but it has loads of people who have already done research and if one person has made a mistake it gets copied my many others as truth - I went down a leg of my family tree back to about 1500, but then found one my great grand father was adopted so had to start again!

It's really interesting thing to do but can also be frustrating - one one leg I've now gone back pre1500, but on another leg one of my great grandfathers was called Michael McCarthy and came from Dublin - hard to track down the right one!

The interesting thing for me was finding out I have deep family roots in Cornwall and the North East.