Findmypast - The Fully Indexed Births Are Here.

[coombs]

I dont see much improvement. It is just the same as looking at FreeBMD.

[carol8353]

I dont see much improvement. It is just the same as looking at FreeBMD.

The whole point is that the FindMyPast births are now indexed,whereas before you had to trawl through 1/4 by 1/4 and year by year to find someone.

Free BMD is a work in progress,FindMyPast is complete up to 2006.

Carol

[Adnepos_Iacobi]

How disappointing, I was hoping they would have re-transcribed the 1837 to 1911 BMDs.

Presumably you'd be willing to pay a vast increase in your subscription to cover the cost of such a Herculean task.

I agree with Gadget - I've just tried it out and so far think it's excellent.

Jennifer

Pulling out the pre-1911 surnames would be Herculean but I think it could be 'profitable' for seller and buyer if managed properly. From the buyer's side, think of all those certificates you have ordered only to find out that the mother/wife could not possibly be right for the individual you want.

A few District Register Office birth indexes have been supplemented with mother's name pre-1911, with similar arrangement for marriages, including those remarriage details. If if can be done at a District level, why not for the General -I think my above qualification of 'managed properly' is the key.

[Gadget]

Pulling out the pre-1911 surnames would be Herculean but I think it could be 'profitable' for seller and buyer if managed properly. From the buyer's side, think of all those certificates you have ordered only to find out that the mother/wife could not possibly be right for the individual you want.

A few District Register Office birth indexes have been supplemented with mother's name pre-1911, with similar arrangement for marriages, including those remarriage details. If if can be done at a District level, why not for the General -I think my above qualification of 'managed properly' is the key.

You cannot be serious, to quote a comedy programme 

Pulling out the mother's surnames would mean accessing all the full certificates, 1837-1911 

Can you imagine if  it went to a private company and the GRO charged £9.25 a throw 


Gadget

[stonechat]

But as per my previous email it is being done - or should I say it was being done as the Dove/Magpie project.

The replacement project for this has had few details available.
Hopefully it will also jave the same details

[sr30765]

Search features not as good as on Ancestry and they are year behind.

Obviously there are transcription errors whoever manually transcribes them. As an Ancestry member I have found many.

I suppose it is useful now that FindMyPast have an index, you can still use that index for FREE, then if you find an entry that doesn't appear on Ancestry you know you have to start searching but then you have a clue from the FindMyPast search.

I bet FindMyPast won't provide spouses for marriages when they go online.

Overall I am disppointed with FindMyPast search index menu

[FosseWay]

I've just done some test searches on FindMyPast. I haven't looked for enough records to form an opinion as to transcription quality (although I note that my own birth entry is correctly transcribed, which it isn't on Ancestry!), but on the basis of the census transcriptions on FindMyPast and Ancestry, I'd expect FindMyPast's to be better and for them to correct errors more quickly and more authoritatively and permanently than Ancestry.

A very useful tool on FindMyPast is the 'include variants' option for first name and surname, which does genuinely pull up only variants. If you search Ancestry without 'exact search', it'll do daft things like pull up everyone born in the quarter you select even though you've provided a (partial) name.

But you still have to click further than the first results page in order to get quarter, volume and page information. This isn't quite as bad as Ancestry, where for some reason you have to actually open the image (or hover over it to see the URL, at least) to get the quarter, but it's still a major downside compared to FreeBMD, where everything's right there on the first screen after you click Search.

Another thing I haven't tried yet is to do very broad searches. If you try this on FindMyPast's censuses, you regularly get timeouts, which is something that Ancestry seems to be immune to.

[LizzieW]

Another thing I haven't tried yet is to do very broad searches. If you try this on FindMyPast's censuses, you regularly get timeouts, which is something that Ancestry seems to be immune to.

I've never had a timeout searching FindMyPast's censuses and, especially when searching for my husband's ancestors, I do broad searches for hours on end.

Lizzie

[sr30765]

Somebody's lucky not getting time outs, 1911 census is notorious when you do a broad search