In post 42 ammack said "If only taking up the £1 offer it's fine just to check out what they do hold (any/every where) but it would be so much more beneficial to all, if these sites had an index telling us what exactly they have before we subscribe for 6/12 months."
It might also be nice if FindMyPast and other sites didn't also give some record sets titles that are misleading as to the exact nature and range of the records that those record sets actually contain.
It would also be nice if FindMyPast didn't state that a major UK record set which does exist, and which has been transcribed, and which is and has been publicly available for several years, both as transcriptions and also as original document images, doesn't exist, even though they were told more than a year ago that was the case, and even though they afterwards deleted their non existence statement, without of course bothering to inform the customers that those records do exist.
Check out the British shipping passenger lists if you want to figure out what that one is about.
"but it would be so much more beneficial to all, if these sites had an index telling us what exactly they have"
They do have such an index, they always did !, but you just try finding it, I did, but it sure wasn't easy, and for a new user, there isn't much of an indication that it even exists.
I'll post it if you want me to, I actually had to bookmark it so that I could easily find it again without having to hunt for it.
Now on the old and apparently in need of drastic improvement FindMyPast that index was pretty obvious, and super useful, I would even say vitally essential, oneof the best and most useful features of the site in fact, and very compact and quick and easy to grasp, a real one stop shop in fact, and ancestry has always suffered from the same flaw, but even with the current FindMyPast list of records index, some records which do exist as separate record sets, are super hard and sometimes impossible to find, because the new improved version of FindMyPast has helped it's users by lumping related record sets into the same bucket, which was one of the main things that the customers were screaming at FindMyPast about in April 2014, but did FindMyPast listen to them ?, yes of course it did, and then it ignored them.
The most truly bizarre aspect of that situation is, that even though some record sets have been lumped together and can no loner be searched separately as individual record sets by means of the usual search facility, they can be searched as separate record sets, at least after a fashion, by means of an alternative search method.
For example, just try finding and searching the UK death records for deaths at sea.
As for searching records such as UK birth records, for say just people with the name John Smith, sure you can do that, and you'll be given all of the John Smith birth records that match your search criteria, and that was always the case, but now you'll get an added bonus, because the resident over eager to please Labrador that now operates the extremely powerful, and potentially very flexible, FindMyPast search engine, will also give you every birth record within your search criteria for anyone called John William Smith, William John Smith, etcetera.
That's an improvement though over the April 2014 version which would also have given you, sometimes literally millions of search results for everyone with a similar name in any country.
Never mind though, because as the 35 1759 baptism records of the obscure parish of Hookum Falookum in the Marsh are still thankfully available, if that is you can find them, then all is well, so no complaining.
