Hi Alison
The IGI is usually used to find folks after you have exhausted the information in the civil records and census data. There is some post civil information available, but not large amounts.
So if you are tracing your family backwards from yourself, you will eventually find folks on a census who were born before 1837 (England) or 1855 (Scotland). This is when you start to use the IGI. Prior to civil registration, the church was responsible for recording Baptisms, marriages and Burials. If you want to know the possibility of your area being included, you can search the LDS library on the familysearch site.
http://www.familysearch.org/Eng/Library/FHLC/frameset_fhlc.aspNote that there are 2 types of records on the IGI
submitted - research by church members - only as good as the research and this is an unknown
extracted - taken from church records - very reliable (apart from transcription errors). The LDS rarely transcribed death/burial records, so the majority of these records are for baptisms/births and marriages/banns.
Apart from the IGI, there are other files on the family search site
1881 Census of England and Wales (not Scotland)
Ancestral File - submitted records by family researchers
Pedigree Resource File - also submitted by researchers
The vital records online does not cover the UK but it is available on CD.
Trish
