Help for my academic study on family history researchers

[jc26red]

The larger websites like ancestry and Findmypast can be a little difficult and overwhelming to navigate for novices. It's understandable considering the enormous amount of record sets they cover.
A couple of things I find annoying with Ancestry is the movement of records to maximise profits.. I.e.
Military records which were once free for UK subscriptions now come under another subscription to view the image.
Secondly, when announcing a new set of records, I find it takes ages before they have transcribed and added all or enough records for the search to return successful results.
I don't keep my tree online but I do have a couple of other forums.. one for a one name study and one for a small group of friends who met on another forum which subsequently closed.

I have only searched Scotlands People for a few people but on the whole it's been ok.

[StanleysChesterton]

I've done the survey.

I forgot to say in that .... I think what is frustrating is that you can do searches of what's been transcribed, but often don't then also have access to an image of the originals, to look for yourself.  Sometimes there's stuff in originals that you can see when you're really, really looking, that a transcriber got wrong or omitted.  And, it's nice to just see the images and read some of them sometimes, especially those with little notes in the margins.

Also, with results, you don't know what you don't know.... it might show Jonas Findyerman - but you don't know that there are 4 other parishes within 3-4 miles that haven't been transcribed .... so you might think he's the right one... A handy "parish lookup" map with mouseover showing what's available/dates would be handy.... I've been keeping a spreadsheet, but that's not as a map so hard to spot adjacent parishes easily.   I know what I mean, not sure I wrote that clearly though

[artisann]

Survey completed 

[Joyful]

Survey completed

[Jool]

Hi, survey done.

The subscription sites I use are Ancestry (World sub) and Findmypast (UK sub).  Personally I prefer Ancestry, it is the first site I subscribed to as a novice (almost 10 years ago) and I found it quite easy to navigate.

I have a couple of gripes though about Ancestry.  Firstly, those annoying hints which often throw up results which are clearly not my ancestors - a novice could easily accept these suggestions and follow the wrong family line.  Another is the assumption that you are in America.  As far as I know there are 15 towns in the world called Birmingham, 14 in America, 1 in the UK.  Many of my Ancestors are from Birmingham, England, so to ensure I get the best results I have had to go through my Ancestry online tree and make sure I have stated England on every record.

Although I don't find Findmypast as easy to navigate, I subscribe mainly for the 1939 Register (which does have some problems with transcription errors) and the Newspaper records.

[maggbill]

Have done survey.  Found it interesting that "Rootschat" wasn't on the list of website - because it has over the years proved to be of massive help to me and my research.  Between Scotlandspeople and Rootschatters I have got much further with my research than I would have have imagined.

Thank you Rootschat!

[j4ckmchugh]

Thanks so much to all of you who took the survey!

[loobylooayr]

Completed your survey Jack.

[hsfam]

Survey completed.

Noticed GRO wasn't on the list.