"Access the Birth, Marriage and Death Index for nothing"

[trish251]

But with regard to the Birth, Marriage, Death Index which can be viewed freely now, one can imagine that the ultimate goal of Ancestry is to make the Index fully searchable under both family name AND given name, as the company called "familyrelatives.org" has already provided for the period 1866-1920. As any of you who have used that site know, being able to search for an entry at the click of a button, rather than tediously searching through page after page, is simply wonderful. If Ancestry do that, then no doubt this new service will cease to be free.

Given that FreeBDM is doing precisely this, and now has the indexes almost complete in the 19th Century and is into the 20th Century, it is unlikely that Ancestry will separately do this. The use of the images will simply allow one to confirm the FreeBDM transcript if doubts arise as to validity.

Like many jobs/money making schemes of previous eras, the completion of FreeBDM and FreeCen projects will make all of these pay systems redundant.

Trish

[UKgirl]

Of course, FreeBMD is wonderful and we all wish for it to be completed as soon as possible - more of us should volunteer to help.

But in the meantime - there is still 1911-1984 to be completed. I simply imagine that Ancestry will get there first!! I have no information about this, it just seems logical that they have some sophisticated scanning system to help them in this endeavour. After all, "familyrelatives.org" seemed to achieve the scanning of the 1866-1920 period very quickly indeed.

UKgirl

[animet]

Something that none of you have pointed out, is that Ancestry offers one free trial per credit card. Of course there are some people who have more than one credit card, and therefore more than one credit card number, and so they may be able to obtain several free trials. But without the credit card information, how would Ancestry be able to limit their free trials to one per person?

Some sites (such as Ebay) use your email address as long as it is not one of the free sort you can obtain off the internet, but one provided by your ISP. This is just as effective as using a credit card number.

I am a fully paid up subscriber to Ancestry I find it great value for money and it has saved me a lot of leg work and expense. I don't mind having to look at loads of pages to find what I'm looking for, before FreeBMD, the only way to find BMD's was to go down to the library and trawl through the micro fiche there. At least now I can do that in the comfort of my own home and not limit myself to when I can do it. I have also got a few clues that I otherwise would have missed by filtering everything but the specific info I'm looking for.

[kerryb]

I would rather trawl through pages of Ancestry any day to fiche after fiche - they make me dizzy!!

Kerry

[julianb]

I have just received my ancestry monthly newsletter and this is what they say:

Ancestry.co.uk is the first and only UK website to offer the entire births, marriages and deaths index for England and Wales from 1837 for FREE. Over 250 million names can be searched by surname range within the birth, marriage and death index now available on Ancestry.co.uk

These records will help you trace those all important ancestors for absolutely free. The birth, marriage and death index is an important piece to the puzzle for family researchers to begin their research.  The service is free with Ancestry.co.uk so you can start searching right now. . .

JULIAN