We started our family tree research in 1998 in response to questions from our then seven year old daughter following the death of one of her great grandmothers whom she found it hard to believe had ever been young. She asked: "How many ancestors have I got? Do they go all the way back to cave men? Did they really all have children? How do you know they all had children?"Our daughter's interest prompted her one remaining great grandmothers to give us a draft copy of her maternal family tree dating back to around 1800 (the 5th great grand parents) which her cousin had compiled some years earlier.This acted as a challenge to us to find all our direct ancestors back to the 5th great grandparents of the kids and, if possible find out more about them.
There are now 37 generations in the Bradbury-Baker database going from the 21st to the 11th century when some distant great grand parents arrived in England with William the Conqueror. If there had been no marriages between cousins, however distant, this would mean 68,719,476,736 35th great grandparents (236) Clearly quite impossible, but it does illustrate that well before the 37th generation everyone is likely to find several Kings and members of every walk of life: eminent lawyers, scientists, wealthy land owners, traders, rogues and criminals in their family tree as well as the "ordinary grandmas and grandpas". The population of Britain in the 11th century has been estimated to be somewhere between 1.25 and 2 million (see Doomsdaybook) so even allowing for a significant number of immigrants in the tree many married couples must have had a common set of great grandparents somewhere back along the line.
Generated using Webtrees the database allows you to search for surnames and explore family relationships. Once into Webtrees you can use the "Lists" to browse the families and individuals and the "Charts" to view the trees.
Click on the picture or link below to search the database
The Sticks family tree database 
22 September 2024. Full family history with 1224 surnames and 6672 individuals and 2031 families
The Certificate Databases provide tables of certificates with sort, filter and view options. Note the certificate information is transcribed from certified copies and there is no information for persons presumed living. There are no certificate images.
We found these sites useful
UK and Ireland Genealogy - GENUKI - got us off to a good start.
Census information - all you need to know about UK censuses from the National Archives
Registration Districts - a page within GENUKI, but I think it is worth bookmarking it separately.
Staffordshire and Stoke on Trent Archive Service and also here from CPHC