find my past

[Mean_genie]

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.

Subscription sites that have digitised records from TNA have them under licence, for which they pay. Some of the records are also available on TNA's own site, but most of the really big collections, such as the census and army service records, are not. So most of the time there is no competition between TNA and commercial sites, although there may be competition between sites. Where there is a choice between using the TNA site and a commercial site, TNA get paid either way, whether it's a pay-per view download from their own site or a royalty payment from Ancestry, Findmypast, the Genealogist, My Heritage or any other site I don't know about.

[Poppy62]

Thanks for your reply.
It was Scottish records that I was looking at. I will have a look at these other sites.

Rosie

[Dolmen]

In Ireland the situation is generally different.

The National Archives of Ireland and findmypast.ie entered into a commercial licence agreement for the Landed Estates Rentals, prison registers and petty sessions /dog licences registers. as far as I know these are the only National Archives of Ireland collections subject to an exclusive licence deal. These collections are not available anywhere else, not even on the NAI site, so there is no competition. It was a commercial agreement, so presumably both parties benefit financially, according to the terms. That's fine. I have no problem with it. Researchers using findmypast would assume some such financial agreement was in place.

It's very different to the deal with other National Archives of Ireland collections. The National Archives of Ireland has its own site giving free access to these collections -

    Census of Ireland, 1901 and 1911, and pre-1901 survivals
    Census Search Forms, 1841 – 51
    Tithe Applotment Books, 1823 – 37
    Soldiers’ Wills, 1914 – 1918
    Calendars of Wills and Administrations, 1858 – 1922
    Prerogative and diocesan copies of some wills and indexes to others, 1596 – 1858
    Diocesan and Prerogative Marriage Licence Bonds Indexes, 1623 – 1866
    Catholic qualification & convert rolls, 1700 – 1845
    Valuation Office house, field, tenure and quarto books 1824 – 1856
    Shipping agreements and crew lists, 1863 – 1921
    Will Registers 1858 – 1900

These exact same records are also available free on findmypst.ie and (some of them, at least) on familysearch. The deal is that these collections must be free to access. No licence fee was charged, no money is paid to the National Archives when the collections are accessed.

The only till ringing is findmypast's as they rope in the beginner to pay a subscription for records that the company is obliged to offer free of charge. The fact these free records include some of the most basic and important records in findmypast's Irish collection makes this marketing ploy all the more cynical.

I don't have a problem with a business making money from records. I have a problem with a business roping in the unwary to subscribe to free records.

[Mean_genie]

There are some major Irish records from TNA on findmypast.ie, the Poverty Relief Loans (Irish Reproductive Loan Fund) for some western counties, and the Royal Irish Constabulary records for the whole of Ireland, that you won't find anywhere else.

I agree that free access isn't always as good a deal as it appears when some material is free elsewhere, but in fairness to FindMyPast and other commercial sites, they may have indexed the records independently, or have search engine functionality that isn't found elsewhere.

On a slightly different tack, I use ScotlandsPeople a lot, but I use the census indexes on FindMyPast and/or Ancestry first because they are much more detailed than the ScotlandsPeople ones - very helpful when you are researching common names - so my Ancestry and FindMyPast subs help me save money on ScotlandsPeople.