find my past

[Poppy62]

Hi All

Find My Past is offering free access to BDM AND census until 15th January.

Rosie

[Wexflyer]

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!

[aghadowey]

... which are already online free!

http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/

https://civilrecords.irishgenealogy.ie/churchrecords/civil-search.jsp

[groom]

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.

[Sinann]

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.

[Dolmen]

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.

[Sinann]

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.

[Wexflyer]

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?

[Dolmen]

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.