RootsChat.Com
Beginners => Family History Beginners Board => Topic started by: Harry Brewer on Tuesday 01 April 08 14:15 BST (UK)
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Being fairly new to this lark, I am bemused at the number of online databases there are.
I would be grateful if someone could give an opinion as to the most helpful. (I am thinking of subscription here) such as A*******, The G**********, Find My P***, etc.
harry
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Welcome to these wonderful pages.
I am not an expert but through reading pages on here from those who are Find my Past is reckoned to be the most accurate,
Don't overlook Free BMD and Family Search.
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I signed up for a 14 day trial of Ancestry, and started to rummage around with the Censuses and liked it so much I bought the company... erm, I mean I subscribed, but it felt like I'd bought the company!
Lots of useful info and a good online tree program, but pricey and not the best indexes (indices?) for the censuses (censi?) but I still like it
Findmypast is very useful for families who travel a lot, unlike mine.
Don't forget all the free stuff out there, especially familysearch and freebmd. And Rootschat as well
Glen
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I like Findmypast, the transcriptions are much more accurate and if you find a mistake and let them know, they check it out and alter it almost straight away. Ancestor takes longer to check the mistake and then only puts a sign by the name or whatever is wrong, to show there is an alternative.
Findmypast does not yet have all the censuses but it is getting there. It has National Burial Index which Ancestry doesn't have.
I think there are pros and cons for both FindMyPast and Ancestry and I subscribe to both at the moment, although whenever I think of giving up on Ancestry, I find I need to search for something that isn't on FindMyPast yet.
Lizzie
modified ps. On Ancestry you can only point out mistranscriptions of names, which is not helpful when I wanted to tell them they had mistranscribed as Staffordshire a birth place which was very clearly shown on the census as Suffolk.
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Hiya Harry
Welcome to Rootschat!
I use Ancestry though I sometimes swear about their transcribing and I'm thinking of subscribing to Findmypast too
There is a lot of free info too as others have pointed out such as FreeBMD Familysearch FreeCEN and FreeREG
Plus there is always us lot to help find that elusive ancestor ;D
Willow x
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Hi Harry,
I noticed that one of your areas is Wiltshire; are you aware that Wiltshire has an online parish clerk? It is a volunteer site so worth checking at regular intervals and best of all it is free!
Nanny Jan
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Thanks for your suggestions. No votes for "The Genealogist"?
Harry
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Hi Harry,
Subscription sites!
The LDS Family History Centres, Local Libraries, Public Record Offices and RootsChat get my vote.
Having said that I'm toying with the idea of subscribing to Emerald Ancestors so that I can get some replies to people with ancestors from the counties in the north of Ireland.
By the way I'd recommend a subscription to one of the Family History magazines as they contain great articles which are full of helpful information.
Christopher
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I think it very much depends on what you're looking for. What time periods? Just UK, or are you trying to track (em/imm)igrant ancestors? What sort of budget? Yearly fee, or pay-as-you-go?
http://www.familyhistoryonline.net/ is one that's often overlooked, but very reasonable. It's based off transcriptions from various county FHS, so it very much depends on what you're looking for. (It seems they'll soon be transferring most of their records to findmypast, though...)
Remember to check with your local library - some have access to Ancestry Library Edition on their computers (my local does), so you can at least check it out before parting with your hard-earned cash. :)
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I'll second familyhistoryonline
It came up with the marriage and burial of my 4 x GGrandfathers first wife - which slightly miffed a cousin who was researching the same line and had been looking for the info for years ;D
I can see it heading towards a Findmypast subscription for me
Willow x
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I'll second familyhistoryonline
It came up with the marriage and burial of my 4 x GGrandfathers first wife - which slightly miffed a cousin who was researching the same line and had been looking for the info for years ;D
Me too Willow - except it was my 3x g grandfather's one and only marriage. No-one else researching that line had found it as he'd slipped out of county.
Jan ;)
And of course Welcome to Rootschat Harry - the best of the free resources :D
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There is much to criticize about Ancestry, but I think it gives the best coverage. I have done some little stats tables on records in Anc, FindMyPast and The Gen;
with my names Ancestry came out best (for finding most correct names in census).
There are also many extras like Pallot's marriage index and obscure databases from parishes if you look. I think it is worth going to try it out at your library. But whatever you do (in my opinion, but it is shared by many others) do not be seduced into using their online trees.
Findmypast is nicer to use in some ways, The Genealogist has some great things like the maps. Unfortunately when I used it recently I found many errors in census data; more than Ancestry (and that is saying something). They do get back to you if you report the errors, but some of them were very obvious mis-readings of clear census pages.
Try them out if you can, but I think if you are starting that Ancestry is best. There are often special offers on membership - I cannot see any today, but there may be around WDYTYA in May. Look at the covers of the many Family History magazines to see if they have any offers.
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I agree that Ancestry is essential if you can only afford one subscription. It takes time to find your way around it but there is a lot more than just the censuses.
I subscribed to the Genealogist for a couple of years, and liked this too. It is much easier to search the BMDs than Ancestry, and has (I think) all the censuses now. The Phillimore transciptions of parish records is very good, although that would depend on your counties.
At the moment I have Ancestry and Findmypast, but I'm a bit disappointed with the latter, and probably wont continue with it after a year.
If you are choosing one of the three I would definitely go for Ancestry, I can't imagine that I would give that up in spite of its annoyances.
Anne
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H Harry i use UKBMD.org.uk of wiltshire. (not complete yet?) if the name you want is there you can click on the link, fill in the form to get cert. direct from local office. John
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Hi and welcome Harry, i am like Christopher and like any of the ones that are free ;D
with the cost of certificates and the price some sites charge for records all in all this is a very expensive game. So anything i can get for free gets my vote.
AND THE BEST THING THATS FREE IS HERE, ROOTSCHAT ;D
but youcould also tried this thread yet?
Migky ;)
http://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php/topic,255037.0.html
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For all its faults, Ancestry redeems itself somewhat by having a very powerful search engine, so you can often find things in spite of the sometimes bizarre transcriptions.
The other thing you need to watch out for with Ancestry is that different databases are indexed in different ways, even when the are superficially similar. The documents in the two WW1 Army Records series are very similar, but the Service Records (aka Burnt Documents) includes a searchable field for residence that the Pensions (Unburnt Documents) does not have.
Some of its databases, like the census, have been indexed by/for Ancestry, from the original documents. Others, like the telephone directories, have been scanned using OCR, and are 'untouched by human hand' as it were. Some of the results are a little odd!
Findmypast is generally good with regard to quality of indexing - their very first product was the full set of BMD indexes, which were orginally produced for in-house use by Title Research, the parent company. So they had a vested interest in their accuracy. Since then they have changed their name from 1837online and produced more databases, as well as acquiring existing ones from a business called The National Archivist, and from Familyhistoryonline. I can't vouch for the former, but the Familyhistoryonline material is generally of high quality. My main criticism of Findmypast is that their website is not as user-friendly as it might be.
The Genealogist generally has good quality information and some useful features, but it is very poor at describing the actual contents and coverage of a database. Their BMDregisters site is particularly disappointing in this regard, where the descriptions are inaccurate and rather misleading, although it includes clear images of the actual records. It is also very expensive, and the search facility leaves a lot to be desired, but hopefully this will improve as more records are added.
Some actual databases are available on more than one site, but even though the information is identical, the type of search engine used can make a difference. The FreeBMD database is also available on Ancestry, and I generally use the original FreeBMD, but sometimes the Ancestry one is more useful - you get the results in alphabetical order, not chronological as on FreeBMD, and you can cross-search with other Ancestry databases. The original 1881 census, compiled by volunteers under the direction of the LDS Church, is available all over the place, but again, there are differences depending on the search engine. The version on Ancestry has the added advantage that it contains submitted corrections and alternate names.
Finally no-one has mentioned Familyrelatives.com, which I have not used, but I know some experienced researchers who rate it highly.
Mean_genie
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Family relatives is good if you want to isolate an individual, 1860 - 1920.
eg. if I want to find all my William Clulo births in that time span, it will come up with all the William Clulo births individually in a list. You don't have to search lots of pages.
Kooky
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Finally no-one has mentioned Familyrelatives.com, which I have not used, but I know some experienced researchers who rate it highly.
Familyrelatives is, in my opinion, the biggest con on the internet at the moment, and I wouldn't touch it with a very long barge pole!
To view their "free" records, you have to subscribe and buy vouchers, otherwise they are locked. The vouchers aren't charged when you view the "free" records, but they have a time limit on them, so you have to use them on the rest of the site. Once they run out, the records are locked again!
Glen
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A fair point, but if you pay for a subscription and then don't use it, that would be poor value too. If you want free information there are usually better ways of getting it than as one of the extras on a paid-for site, either on a genuinely free site or through the good offices of kind souls such as other Rootschatters who do have subscriptions or access to fiche or other non-online sources.
As some of the earlier posts have said, it depends on exactly what records you need to use, and how much you are likely to use them, and other variables such as transcripts v scanned images etc etc.
Mean_genie
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I currently subscribe to ancestory. This will NOT be renewed next month as i have no new info for about 6 months. the GenesReunited £10 that i spent has been great so far. after that i will use FindMyPast
kev