Hi Kay

Here's what I use:

1) A basic subscription to Ancestry.co.uk --- it wouldn't be half as much fun doing this without access to the actual UK censuses.

2) familysearch.org --- I click on "search records" on narrow horizontal bar on the home page (ignoring the drop-down menu), then click on "International Genealogical Index" on the vertical bar on the left, and then on the IGI page only input a minimum of data to get the best results. You can do either a baptism / marriage search using only the first and last name and birth / marriage date and date range of the person you're looking for, or you can ignore the left side of the screen and do a children search whereby you put in the father's first and last name and mothers's first name and last name too if you know it, (and a separate search also, using the mother's first name but leaving the last name blank) plus a date and year range. In both these types of search you have to choose British Isles for "region" and then IOM or England etc (assuming you're searching for Manx records or mainland records). You also have to be prepared to try different spellings.

3) Brian Lawson's Manx BMD and census indexes. I think that from your messages you already use these.

4) Help from kind people on message board eg Donna's MI look ups.

5) Have a document open (I use an email draft) and paste into it anything you come across which you might want to refer to later when you try to make sense of what you've found.

6) Sketch out little trees as you go along to make it easier to grasp the relationships.

Happy hunting......

Jean C