RootsChat.Com
Ireland (Historical Counties) => Ireland => Topic started by: Poppy62 on Saturday 14 January 17 10:59 GMT (UK)
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Hi All
Find My Past is offering free access to BDM AND census until 15th January.
Rosie ;)
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Hi All
Find My Past is offering free access to BDM AND census until 15th January.
Rosie ;)
But BMD and census are already entirely free on government web sites!
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... which are already online free!
http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/
https://civilrecords.irishgenealogy.ie/churchrecords/civil-search.jsp
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Lots of things on subscription sites are available elsewhere for free, they just keep it quiet! I was surprised the other day that someone who had been looking at their FH for some time said that they couldn't find a birth on Ancestry or FindMyPast. When they were asked if they'd tried Freebmd they said they'd never heard of it. I suppose a lot of it is down to the genealogy programmes on the television where they show people using subscription sites but not the free ones.
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Sometimes even the free to use sites connect to the subscription sites,
Finally got around to using this one http://www.townlandvaluationtranslator.com/p/how-they-farmed.html
And discovered it's links don't connect to the National Archives free land records but to one of the subscription sites.
Maybe it helps to cover costs but it's very off putting.
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The only links I can see on that Townland Valuation Translator site are to askaboutireland and to findmypast's Valuation Books collection. They're both free. All the collections that are free on the NAI site are free on findmypast, although as an earlier poster said, findmypast keep this quiet.
I agree that it might have been easier to link to the Valuation Office Books on the NAI site rather than findmypast, which requires registration, but the findmypast search engine (name variants) is much better.
BTW, the links to findmypast are straight links, so the Translator site owner isn't making any money from them.
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It's not the cost or lack of, it the promotion of a subscription site over TNA, that baffles me, I can't understand why anyone would do that.
I've nothing against subscription sites, they have there place in the grand scheme of things, but thay also have promotion budgets the likes of TNA would drool over.
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All the collections that are free on the NAI site are free on findmypast, although as an earlier poster said, findmypast keep this quiet.
Isn't there a contradiction here? The OP has posted that FindMyPast are offering free access to BMD and census material until tomorrow. The census materials are free on the NAI site (link posted by aghadowey). But you are saying the NAI material is already free on FindMyPast. In which case, how is this free access offer an offer at all?
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I don't condone findmypast.ie's lack of clarity. In my opinion, if you remove the free collections (the ones from the National Archives of Ireland) what's left on findmypast.ie isn't worth anywhere near the annual €114 charge for the Ireland collection.
So yes, there's 'a contradiction' with this weekend's free access. A better description is 'a deceipt'. Findmypast.ie is offering free access to records that are already free to view elsewhere, and that are always free to access on its site.
Ancestry also offers free access to records that are already free to view elsewhere, but it clearly presents them as free. So no deceipt.
As to this weekend's 'free' access on findmypast, the offer is not just for the ie site. The uk, us and australia sites are also allowing free access to their bmds and census records. as far as I know, those records are not free elsewhere, so it's a valid offer for the other territories.
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It's not the cost or lack of, it the promotion of a subscription site over TNA, that baffles me, I can't understand why anyone would do that.
I've nothing against subscription sites, they have there place in the grand scheme of things, but thay also have promotion budgets the likes of TNA would drool over.
Subscription sites that have digitised records from TNA have them under licence, for which they pay. Some of the records are also available on TNA's own site, but most of the really big collections, such as the census and army service records, are not. So most of the time there is no competition between TNA and commercial sites, although there may be competition between sites. Where there is a choice between using the TNA site and a commercial site, TNA get paid either way, whether it's a pay-per view download from their own site or a royalty payment from Ancestry, Findmypast, the Genealogist, My Heritage or any other site I don't know about.
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Thanks for your reply.
It was Scottish records that I was looking at. I will have a look at these other sites.
Rosie :)
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In Ireland the situation is generally different.
The National Archives of Ireland and findmypast.ie entered into a commercial licence agreement for the Landed Estates Rentals, prison registers and petty sessions /dog licences registers. as far as I know these are the only National Archives of Ireland collections subject to an exclusive licence deal. These collections are not available anywhere else, not even on the NAI site, so there is no competition. It was a commercial agreement, so presumably both parties benefit financially, according to the terms. That's fine. I have no problem with it. Researchers using findmypast would assume some such financial agreement was in place.
It's very different to the deal with other National Archives of Ireland collections. The National Archives of Ireland has its own site giving free access to these collections -
Census of Ireland, 1901 and 1911, and pre-1901 survivals
Census Search Forms, 1841 51
Tithe Applotment Books, 1823 37
Soldiers Wills, 1914 1918
Calendars of Wills and Administrations, 1858 1922
Prerogative and diocesan copies of some wills and indexes to others, 1596 1858
Diocesan and Prerogative Marriage Licence Bonds Indexes, 1623 1866
Catholic qualification & convert rolls, 1700 1845
Valuation Office house, field, tenure and quarto books 1824 1856
Shipping agreements and crew lists, 1863 1921
Will Registers 1858 1900
These exact same records are also available free on findmypst.ie and (some of them, at least) on familysearch. The deal is that these collections must be free to access. No licence fee was charged, no money is paid to the National Archives when the collections are accessed.
The only till ringing is findmypast's as they rope in the beginner to pay a subscription for records that the company is obliged to offer free of charge. The fact these free records include some of the most basic and important records in findmypast's Irish collection makes this marketing ploy all the more cynical.
I don't have a problem with a business making money from records. I have a problem with a business roping in the unwary to subscribe to free records.
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There are some major Irish records from TNA on findmypast.ie, the Poverty Relief Loans (Irish Reproductive Loan Fund) for some western counties, and the Royal Irish Constabulary records for the whole of Ireland, that you won't find anywhere else.
I agree that free access isn't always as good a deal as it appears when some material is free elsewhere, but in fairness to FindMyPast and other commercial sites, they may have indexed the records independently, or have search engine functionality that isn't found elsewhere.
On a slightly different tack, I use ScotlandsPeople a lot, but I use the census indexes on FindMyPast and/or Ancestry first because they are much more detailed than the ScotlandsPeople ones - very helpful when you are researching common names - so my Ancestry and FindMyPast subs help me save money on ScotlandsPeople.