Big Problem - signing in to Ancestry free access sites

[MarieC]

Brave fellow, Simon! 

I won't be bothering you about Glamorgan either!    Congratulations.  Before you know where you are, you'll have got yourself into the parish register room and will be in your element! 

MarieC

[Simon G.]

This is all part of a clever plot to be able to research my own Glamorgan lot...I mean, um...I love the Record Office.

[ludovica]

Congrats Simon. You have my dream job!

[pompeyboy]

Congrats Simon...working in any part of a Records Office must be fantastic.....i'm going greener by the minute...well done

Steve

[mrs griff]

Hope to see you someday i live in Glamorgan and often use the Record office , i will make myself known to you

              Best Wishes and Well Done !!
   
                                 Mrs Griff

[pjaj]

You can always go straight to FreeMBD, and bypass Ancestry.co.uk.
They are at http://freebmd.rootsweb.com/
This site is completely free and has some features I've not found on Ancestry.
They are also running FreeREG (parish register transcriptions) and FreeCEN (their own transcriptions of the censuses) but it's early days yet for these two projects.

For example, you know that John Smith married Mary ?
If you find John's marriage On FreeBMD you can then see all the people on that page of the register (NOT the index), usually only 4, two men and two women.
One will be Mary Jones and the other Joan Blogs.
Now you've found Mary's maiden name and the registry entry, you can get the Marriage cert. and find their fathers, and so on.

You don't even have to know Mary's name at all. Look up the other man in the next census and find his wife's name (Joan), then by a process of elimination, the other woman is John's wife. Doesn't always work, but well worth a try.

Not so easy to do on Ancestry as it only seems to have the index, dozens of people on one page, not always with their spouse's name.
I could be wrong on this but I've not found the data in the same format as FreeBMD.

[Simon G.]

The problem with the FreeBMD solution at this present time is that it's not complete.  I've no doubt in a few more years once they've completed their work that no-one in their right mind is ever going to pay anyone for the indexes (unless, of course, Ancestry or whoever get DOVE when it's completed), but for now there's nearly a century of entries we're all dependent on paid subscriptions for.

If you have Kent ancestors and are looking for a marriage, though, it's far easier to check out the Kent Registration Services index at http://extranet3.kent.gov.uk/sp/rois/home.html.  With them you can find out the exact date and even the location (providing you know which church a registration number corresponds too...there's a list of them somewhere online to download), and of course the Medway region offer their parish registers online.  Some other counties also have similar projects running for their local indexes (I recall reading in FTM last month about the Isle of Wight's project).  Really if projects like these continue to be introduced, in the future we're not going to need the indexes as they exist on Ancestry at all...but for the time being, we're pretty much stuck.

[Sylviaann]

Amazing then how after 20 years of searching I have never subscribed to an internet site.  How on earth have I managed?  I've only asked for a few lookups of census information recently.

Oh yes of course I got it free at my library or LDS centre(in England)

 But then I'm a poor pensioner.

Sylviaann

[Simon G.]

Ironically it would cost me more to get to my "local" LDS centre than it would cost for a months subscription to Ancestry...