England and Wales Genealogy Resources and Information

• 1837 - Present: Since 1837 all births, marriages and deaths in England and Wales have had to be registered at the register office in the district where the event took place, while for Scotland the start date is 1855 and for Ireland it was 1864 for births & deaths and 1845 for marriages (though many Irish records were destroyed in 1922).
• FreeBMD project, whose goal is to transcribe the Civil Registration index of births, marriages and deaths for England and Wales, and to provide free internet access to these transcriptions.
• FamilySearch Labs now has index information for England baptisms (1700-1900) and marriages (1700-1900) with more records coming.
• Overview of the Registration Districts in England and Wales (1837-1974).
• "Online Parish Clerk" projects are individually run projects which aim to extract and preserve the records from the various parishes (along with other data) and to provide online access to that data, FREE of charge. The Lancashire project includes a nice list of all the current projects; go to the page and click on "links" on the left side.   
• FreeREG is a companion web-site to the FreeBMD site already mentioned - sharing the same purpose of making transcribed baptism, marriage and burial (from both parish and non-conformist registers) available to be freely searched on the internet. It includes records for England, Wales and Scotland
• .GENUKI Directory of UK genealogy-related material. You can browse at the county level for a pretty comprehensive overview of what materials might help your search in that particular county.
• Non-conformist (e.g., Methodists, Wesleyans, Baptists, Independents, Protestant Dissenters, Congregationalist, Presbyterians, Unitarians, Quakers, Dissenters, Catholics, Russian Orthodox, etc.)? (read the complete piece).Some 'dissenters' still considered themselves part of the Church of England and, in many cases they continued to use their parish church for the rites of baptism, marriage, and burial. In 1754, after Hardwicke's Marriage Act, only clergyman of the Church of England could perform marriages. However, Quakers and Jews were exempted. Some Anglican vicars refused to bury an unbaptised person, which can result in the establishment of a separate burial ground or burial on unconsecrated ground. After 1837, non-conformist records were recorded as above.
  Non-conformist registers are just coming online at the www.BMDRegisters.co.uksite (in association with the UK National Archives).