WOULD-BE family historians are well catered for on the Internet with plenty of sites offering to help people find out more about their ancestors.

From fanatical hobbyists to official record-keepers, there is plenty of information online to help surfers interested in genealogy. And although we have fewer family records online than Americans, there is still a lot of help at hand for British researchers.

A first port of call could be the London-based Society of Genealogy (www.sog.org.uk) which is useful for background information and guides to off-line records. And, still with official records, the UK and Ireland genealogical information service (www.genuki.org.uk) gives plenty of advice about tracing your family tree as well as links to The Public Record Office (www.pro.gov.uk/familyhistory).The website also has a "quick start" section with some basic advice on starting searching. One of the best-known sources is probably the service offered by the Mormon church which has a huge database and adds names daily at www.familysearch.com. But for links of interest, it is hard to beat the site created by Cyndi Howells who has pulled together 85,000 links of interest including thousands of British ones at www.cyndislist.com.

And if your family search leads you to look up the details of soldiers, The Commonwealth War Grave Commission website at www.cwgc.org details the records of nearly two million graves.

The site also keeps details of the 60,000 civilians who died in the Second World War.

If you have discovered something amazing about your family while tracing your ancestors, please e-mail me and share your experience with other readers.

Some of the readers who contacted The Cyber Space about problems with their ISPs have now had replies which are published in the news section of our e-magazine at www.thisisthenortheast.co.uk/internetlife.