Family Historian User Group

Hi,

I've been using FreeBMD and FreeCEN to build up a basic family tree structure, but I've reached the point of considering subscription services.

I'm only (currently) interested in the source data; not uploading/downloading trees.

I've seen Ancestry mentioned a number of times, as well as Find My Past. What about Genes Reunited or TheGenealogist? Any tips/tricks/dos/don'ts, or are they all pretty similar?

Cheers

ID:6738

See Family History Research in the Knowledge Base.
Take a look at the Useful Research Web Sites (Research).

Yes, FreeBMD and FreeCEN are handy, and have some useful search options, but fall a long way short of being complete for some years.

Which sites are best partly depends on which countries you are researching.
There are a few FH V5 Plugins that help search Ancestry and FindMyPast.

If you have just brought a copy of FH did it come with a trial to World vital records?

I've downloaded a demo, but haven't bought a copy yet.

Bonzo said:
If you have just brought a copy of FH did it come with a trial to World vital records?

OK - I do not know if they still do the WVR trial now anyway.

The boxed version of FH5 does not come with the old WVR freebie.

Personally I tend to switch between Ancestry and FMP, as it can be handy to have access to both, so I do 6 months or 3 months with one and then swap to the other.

I find Family Search

https://www.familysearch.org/

quite good, especially for records before the census and GRO indexes, and it's FREE. You can play some useful combinations with their search engine, eg find all the children with surname Smith with parents John Smith and Margaret born in Suffolk between year xx and year yy

There's a related site

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.anc ... s.htm#Page

which lets you search the Family Search database but you can first select the Country/County/Place.

When you find an entry that you want, expand it to show the details then just use a screen capture program to capture and save an image of the entry to use as a multimedia object and link it to your source record in FH.

One small word of warning when using Family Search, for any newbies. There are two classes of data there, the user submitted trees and the transcriptions from original records, remember to treat the user submitted data with great caution.

It's not as easy on the new familysearch to tell the difference.
As far as I can tell, MOST original data has ODM in the reference at the bottom of the page.
Whereas user submitted records have EASY in the reference.

I think (only think!!) that the New Family Search has mostly extracted records in its main results when searching. I 'think' that the user submitted (less reliable ) records are in another part of the website. I know I've used a list from the 'New' search to help find entries in actual Parish Records (such as those on the excellent 'LincstothePast') and they have all been correct.

I also subscribe to Ancestry and FindmyPast. If I could only afford one of them I would go for Ancestry Premium. With that you can view a lot of actual images for PRs in selected areas. I have saved a fortune on marriage certificates!!!!

Anne

Many UK public libraries subscribe to Ancestry UK, making it free for members to access via the library PC.

Just had a look and it appears that my local library subscribes to both Ancestry UK and FindMyPast - I'll set aside some time to try these out!

I mainly interested in the quality of the images of the UK census at the moment.

tatewise said:
Many UK public libraries subscribe to Ancestry UK, making it free for members to access via the library PC.

The quality of UK Census images is generally quite good, but it depends mainly on which decade you are researching.
The earlier 1841/1851/1861 years are sometimes not so good and the handwriting more difficult to read.
The later 1891/1901/1911 years are usually better.
However, there is a transcript to help in translation, although it is sometimes incomplete or inaccurate.

Whatever service you consider, I highly recommend taking advantage of any and all 'learning center' materials which are offered for new users. I read the blogs, I sign up for free e-mail newsletters, and so on. Many of the services have free weekends or special access to part of their collections around the holidays, and the blogs and newsletters will alert you to this, as well as show what collections are being added, alert you to changes in the user interface, and so on. Lessons in the learning center will show you what wildcards are available when searching, etc.

The more you are familiar with the service before you subscribe, and the records held there, the less time you will waste on chasing records for people who turn out not to be your family, or making bad assumptions about the meaning of what you find. [oops]

I've discovered that it really helps to use different services to cross-check the others. Indexes for the same record collection can vary wildly between services, as can image quality. I've found records on free sites that don't turn up on Ancestry because the Ancestry index is hideous. Using the other information from the record without the name, I was then able to find the record on Ancestry.

So far I haven't had the discipline to do what Jane suggests, switching back and forth between Ancestry and FMP, but if you are organized and keep a good research journal and a To-Do list, switching between services is very effective.

For the UK, I suggest heading over to GENUKI: http://www.genuki.org.uk/, and consulting references like Christian's THE GENEALOGIST'S INTERNET -- links from the book are here: http://www.spub.co.uk/tgi4/ and Herber's book ANCESTRAL TRAILS http://www.genealogical.com/index.php?m ... umber=2692 to learn more about what records exist, and what records are online.

For me, the decision of what service to use comes down to what times and places are covered by the records the service has. If the records you need don't exist because they were lost, or don't exist online, or aren't part of what that service offers, it doesn't matter how good the subscription service is. I remember being really excited when I first signed up for a worldwide Ancestry subscription, because I wanted to look for records of when one of my husband's families came to the US from Canada. Only after upgrading from the US to the World subscription, I found out that no one kept records of people coming from Canada to the US until decades after the time period I needed. So keep that in mind, when you consider whether any of these services are right for you.

I also recommend the One-Step Web Pages by Stephen P. Morse: http://stevemorse.org/, especially if using Ancestry. He has a search form for searching the 1841 to 1901 censuses, similar to FreeCEN, with a drop-down for the year, so you can search without having to fill in the data over and over again: http://stevemorse.org/census/uk.html. There's also a 1901 Census page http://stevemorse.org/census/uk1901a.html to search 1901censusonline.com.

Jan, I'll give my plugin for Census searching 'Ancestor's UK Census Checker' 'plug' as it works similarly to the Steve Morse one I think, but works directly from FH producing a page of links for both Ancestry and Find my past, while omitting those ancestors for years when they have census data or were known to be not alive.

[EDIT by Mike Tate]
There is also now the similar Plugin Lookup Missing Census Facts that supports UK, USA, Canadian and Australian Census Records online at all Ancestry and FindMyPast websites.

Jane, As an aside in this post, is there any chance of a version of the plugin to check the US census on ancestry and FMP?

The biggest job is working out the dataset links, which Keir did for the Canadian ones and then produce a version for the US. If you can find the links producing a US version should not be too bad, you also need the dates for the Census data and put the Census Sets and data sets in.

Does FMP have US census I could not see any?

The FMP full US Census records are at http://www.findmypast.com.

It lets me login with my http://www.findmypast.co.uk account username & password, but I only have a Britain Full Subscription and not a World Subscription, so must use PAYGo to view records, except the 1940 Census which is FREE.

Similarly, http://www.findmypast.ie lets me login and search Irish records, but to view records needs PAYGo.

I had a quick look, but I think the FMP ones on .com are using a different search logic, the problem is it's not a public api so I have to reverse engineer it from the web page source code.

Had a quick play with Ancestry Library Edition this morning, looking at the 1911 Census.

The only options on the site for getting a copy of the original image were Print and Share. Decided to go for the Share option, which emails a 'friend' a link to what you have found.

When I got home they was an email from my 'friend'. The link in the email took me to the scanned image with a Save option, but when I tried to save the image, I got prompted to sign-up...

However, discovered that if I viewed the image at 100%, I could 'Save Image As...' from the browser. (Had to do this twice, as it was now in two parts, but easy to join together.)

Will play around a bit more next week, and also try FMP.

Nosferatu if you go for the print option you may be able to print to file or there are programs you download to 'print to pdf'. This adds an option to your printers list to print to pdf. I used to use this quite a lot but can not remember which program I used to use now.

Found the [Save] image option on a different toolbar.

From a small sample of images for 1911, it appears that those in Ancestry are scanned at a higher resolution, but have the 'Infirmity' column blanked.

So, think I'll go with FMP as the primary source of images, backed up by Ancestry for any missing/hard to read ones.

These trips to the local library will keep me busy for a while!

Referring back to the postings about looking up U.S.A. and other Census Records on both Ancestry and FindMyPast, there is now a Plugin to do just that.
See Lookup Missing Census Facts ~ New Plugin for details.