Where do I start?

[Athenajm80]

Hi, over Christmas my dad showed me some albums he has made of old photos and we started discussing the family tree. He has gone back to around the late 1790s/early 1800s but then drew a blank.

He's given me what he's done so far (which I need to change the format of, but I think I am ok with that), but where do I start? Are there sites you would recommend/not recommend? My family seem to have been very spread across the UK, each generation seem to have moved from their hometown so no easy tracking just in one area.

Dad and my sister are going to contribute when they can which is why I want to change the format he saved it in (an old family tree program which stopped being released in 2003) I'd love to see how far I can go back, and any interesting news articles or anything I can find. Where do I look for stuff like that? Dad is the oldest surviving family member so there's no one else left.

One last thing, and thank you for your patience so far, we have four photos of unidentified soldiers. Is there somewhere that would try to identify them? They look so young, I think they are WWI soldiers. I'd love to be able to give them their names back and maybe even their families.

Thank you for any help

The two older men are relatives, the centre photo is the young soldiers. I just thought I'd add them for interest

If you can get a gedcom export of the file then you can import that into other software or upload it.
Findmypast is pretty good for UK history but ScotlandsPeople (I think) has a lot of Scottish census and registrations that FMP doesn't.
The Mormon Church publish a lot of records for free and freebmd.org has the births, marriage and death indexes free to search.

Ancestry can be done online so you don't need to buy software. Is the old tree in Gedcom format?

The old tree is in pdu I think but gedcom was the one I was looking at converting it into.

Thank you for giving me some starting points, I'm going to try to start tomorrow. I found a website set up by an alumni that's about dad's school in the time he was there, which he was really pleased by. It had loads of class photos and "do you know who these people are" which he wants to explore. It had updates on some of his old classmates and teachers who have died, sad but he was interested to find out more about them.

Newspaper Archives are useful for putting the context on facts. You may be able to google the photo studios, some local enthusiasts may be able to date them and id the uniforms. There are lots of local facebook groups if you know the county.