* Which online FH offers best value

[jatclarke999]

Hi all

A general question regarding the online providers of FH information.

I am currently signed up to both Find my past and Genes reunited.

I find GR useful for tracing ancestors via other people's research and the sharing of information. I also am signed up to Find my past for helping with searches etc. I am not able to travel much and so far my family research spans UK and Ireland.

I also see Ancestry is offering 3 months free, however I cannot afford to support all 3.

So my general question is - which offers the best research - FMP or Ancestry?

Thanks in advance

John

[tatewise]

I have moved this question to the Research Forum where it fits better.

Check out the research:index|> Genealogy Research especially research:useful_research_web_sites|> Useful Research Web Sites.

Note that there are some FREE sites, and that Ancestry is often FREE via your local public library.
You can get quite far with free guest searches in Ancestry, and then go to the library with the references just to reveal the detailed records & images.
Also some Census Years are entirely free in Ancestry.

There is a discussion along similar lines in the Newbie: Online Research (5613) thread.

[Jane]

Personally I switch between them so I have FMP for 6 months or a year and then Ancestry.

A lot will depend on the databases you want to access especially once you finish with the standard BMD and Census information and move on to Parish and other records as these are often supplied to only one or the other of the main sites.

[davidm_uk]

I use Ancestry (.co.uk as pretty much all of my ancestors are in UK) and Genes Reunited via subscription, then every so often buy some payg credits for Find My Past.

I've also found quite a few records via Family Search https://familysearch.org/search which seems to work well even without signing in, although it costs nothing to register. You only get transcriptions, not original records, but these can help with further searches elsewhere.

If you want to look in a particular village/town etc then Hugh Wallis' site http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.anc ... s.htm#Page
can help find records (again transcriptions). You can list all records (or just all for a particular surname) for a particular batch (town, parish, church or chapel), useful for looking for other people in the same family. I think that the site is a bit out of date, and no longer maintained, but still a lot of useful entries on there.

[gerrynuk]

...
I've also found quite a few records via Family Search https://familysearch.org/search which seems to work well even without signing in, although it costs nothing to register. You only get transcriptions, not original records, but these can help with further searches elsewhere.
...

In fact Family Search does have a lot of original records. For example, many, although not all, of the Norfolk Parish Registers are available as images of the original records.

[mezentia]

I'm not sure of the status of the Hugh Wallis site now that the IGI site has been updated. You might find that

http://www.archersoftware.co.uk/igi/

is more comprehensive, although I miss the presentation of search results that the old site used to give.

[jmurphy]

Picking up on one of Mike's points:

Note that there are some FREE sites, and that Ancestry is often FREE via your local public library.
You can get quite far with free guest searches in Ancestry, and then go to the library with the references just to reveal the detailed records & images.
Also some Census Years are entirely free in Ancestry.

Here in the US, Ancestry has been advertising on TV and so on, so much that newcomers often think that they can't do anything without signing up for it. But no service will provide good value if the user doesn't understand how it works, or it doesn't have records to cover the areas the user needs to look for.

As Mike correctly points out, there are many collections which are free to search on Ancestry. There are other valuable things which are also free to use, such as the Learning Center. I highly recommend using these free collections and resources, and learning how Ancestry works, before you decide whether to subscribe to them or not.

Several years ago, free subscriptions to Ancestry were bundled with copies of Family Tree Maker, and I was lucky enough to pick up a copy at a bargain price which came with a year's free subscription. I can say with confidence that I wasted that year just messing about not knowing what I was doing. If you are on a tight budget, IMHO it's far better to watch the YouTube videos, read the Learning Center articles, and so on, so that when you do choose to sign up for the service, you can make the most of your subscription money.