evaluating websites -- where to subscribe?

jmurphy · Post by **jmurphy** » 04 Apr 2009 18:09

Since this is a question that comes up often, I thought it might be useful to start a general discussion on the topic.

My answer to the 'should I subscribe to X' question are the following two questions:

1) what records does the website have for the places and time periods you need to study and

2) how difficult is it to answer question one?

In the case of the websites I've used so far, you often need to have the subscription already to know if a particular record will be of use to you or not. Very frustrating, and costly too, if you are on a pay-as-you-go plan.

On the other hand, I can see why Ancestry, Find My Past, etc. don't want to give out a lot of information in their search results, because then people will just plug the information into their programs and not pay for the images.

So my advice for new users would be:

Ancestry: Create a registration for free -- I don't mean sign up for the free trial, I mean the 'registered user' free registration (or create a username on RootsWeb). You can then sign up for their free newsletters. Take advantage of those, of the information on the blogs, the articles in the Learning Center, etc. -- and learn your way around BEFORE you sign up for a free trial or pay them for a subscription.

Find My Past: the above, even more so, because their search results can be even more cryptic than Ancestry's search results.

On pay-as-you-go, it's far too easy to fritter away your credits by looking at images of BMD indexes that end up not having any useful information at all. [oops]

(Yes, as you probably guessed I have credits on FindMyPast which expire soon, and I'm having difficulty finding anything useful to spend them on.)

Jan

ID:3569

aragorn · Post by **aragorn** » 05 Apr 2009 07:41

On the topic of credits for pay-as-you-go (I use these rather than supsciptions as I tend to have a flurry of activity and then don't use for a long time so a subscription would not be cost effective for me)I wish they would last longer,I always seem to end up wasting a few credits as they are never enough for one image etc and means I would have to buy extra credits.Why can't credits be bought that last for at least a year or never expire?[frown]

philjo · Post by **philjo** » 05 Apr 2009 12:23

Check if your local library service subscribes to Ancestry, & which records are avialble - if so, you can always use it there (the Ancestry licences for libraries does not allow users to login at home with their library accounts)

When I occasionally need to search the US census records, I do it whilst visiting the SOG library, as there is full access to the worldwide records on Ancestry (& FMP etc) in the SOG library.

If visiting the National Archives, any _TNA_ owned records that have been digitised - e.g. English censuses, probate, non-conformist RG4 records etc are available on the PCs at Kew free of charge, (you just pay the standard copying fee for for any printouts you make). I managed to identify the people I needed from the non-conformist registers whilst at Kew & printed them out for 30p per A3 page.

FMP credits can be used on the 1911 census site.

Jeremy

gerrynuk · Post by **gerrynuk** » 05 Apr 2009 12:32

'If visiting the National Archives, any _TNA_ owned records that have been digitised - e.g. English censuses, probate, non-conformist RG4 records etc are available on the PCs at Kew free of charge, (you just pay the standard copying fee for for any printouts you make).'

Even better, if you have a laptop or netbook when you visit the TNA, then you can log onto the TNA network and download the images for free.

Gerry

jmurphy · Post by **jmurphy** » 05 Apr 2009 17:51

aragorn said:
On the topic of credits for pay-as-you-go (I use these rather than supsciptions as I tend to have a flurry of activity and then don't use for a long time so a subscription would not be cost effective for me)I wish they would last longer,I always seem to end up wasting a few credits as they are never enough for one image etc and means I would have to buy extra credits.Why can't credits be bought that last for at least a year or never expire?

I have the same problem right now, as I have some credits I bought on the 1911 census site, but not enough to view an image. I have 30 days now to decide what transcription to look at, or find some records on FindMyPast.

However, I do know the answer to the question about why the credits expire. Let's say that we have all purchased credits on FMP and haven't used them. brightsolid must carry that money as a debt on their account books.

After several years, even small amounts add up to too much debt. From an accounting standpoint, it is much better for the company to be able to clear those off.

However, if a company does offer annual subscriptions, why not offer credits which (like the sub) last for a year?

Jan

mezentia · Post by **mezentia** » 06 Apr 2009 11:26

The simple answer is that you may need to subscribe to several sites to get the information you need. For example FMP has (curently) the 1911, census, Ancestry doesn't; FMP has outgoing passenger lists, Ancestry has the incoming ones. Newspaper archives are often payable subscriptions, but for NZ, paperspast is free (over 1200 hits for one surname I'm researching!). There is a free site for trade directories that is searchable, http://www.historicaldirectories.org/hd/, but how long it will stay up is questionable.

Sadly, the commercial world has realised that with easy access to the internet and online resources, family tree research is a widespread hobby, and therefore simply too lucrative to ignore.

The moral must be, simply try the free resources first, e.g. FreeBMD, FreeCen, before shelling out any money. Then, take advantage of any offers, or ssite like RootsChat before signing up with a commercial service. Also, use your local FRC or library.

On a personal note, I currently use Ancestry, and use FMP on a pay-as-you go basis to fill in gaps or track down living relatives.

David

jmurphy · Post by **jmurphy** » 06 Apr 2009 16:14

If you are in the US, and have a World sub, Ancestry has both incoming and outgoing passenger lists. But the question remains -- how easy is it to find someone, and know that you have the right person before you pay?

My problem with all these sites, but with Ancestry especially, is that the search engine is often too dependent on the user finding someone by name.

If I am searching for someone who has gone back and forth from England to the US several times, and I know he died in 1918, I can't tell the search engine to exclude voyages from 1919 onwards.

Yes, perhaps I might miss out on a record which has someone's deceased father's name in a US document as the 'nearest relative' (likely in a Passport Application, not as likely in a Passenger List) but why must I constantly wade through records that obviously belong to a still-living namesake when I know my focus person is dead?

Ancestry is especially bad about taking records which are of the same type and of wildly varying time periods and lumping them together into one online 'database'.

I would love to be able to run a search and then 'search within records' as you can do with a Google search, but as far as I know, refining a search on Ancestry and other sites merely runs the search all over again.

Jan

jmurphy · Post by **jmurphy** » 06 Apr 2009 16:22

Oh, and David, on the topic of newspapers -- Ancestry (and I think World Vital Records also) in the US license a subset of the material on NewspaperArchive.com, so then you have the added problem of trying to figure out if there will be any added benefit to subscribing to NewspaperArchive directly instead of just hoping that Ancestry has pulled in the information you were looking for!

And I'm sure we've all had the problem of a particular record set being advertised, but on further investigation, you find that the county or time period you want has not been indexed or included yet.

I am missing some 1851 Census records. I decided to check FindMyPast again to see if they might have a better index than Ancestry or had records that Ancestry might have missed out on. Nope, still incomplete.

Jan

gerrynuk · Post by **gerrynuk** » 07 Apr 2009 07:05

I am missing some 1851 Census records. I decided to check FindMyPast again to see if they might have a better index than Ancestry or had records that Ancestry might have missed out on. Nope, still incomplete.

Jan,

Large parts of the 1851 Census covering Cambridgeshire, Essex, Suffolk and Dorset are missing. Ancestry has details on its site. The 'missing' (actually damaged and not missing) Manchester pieces have been recovered and are available at

http://www.1851-unfilmed.org.uk/intro.htm

Gerry

jmurphy · Post by **jmurphy** » 08 Apr 2009 04:30

Hi, Gerry --

Thanks for calling the missing counties to my attention. Most of my husband's family is in Devon and Hampshire, so I hadn't noticed.

I did find one of the previously 'missing' families this morning on Ancestry. So sometimes it does help to just pretend you have never searched before and start from scratch.

Jan

gerrynuk · Post by **gerrynuk** » 08 Apr 2009 09:16

Jan,

You have to be quite imaginative when searching the census records. It has even been know for names to be turned around so that John Smith becomes Smith John - ie Forename Smith, family name John. I don't know whether it is true but I believe the surname Ditto is quite common! Spelling can be very variable - especially in the earlier census' when literacy levels were poor. And quite a lot of people seem not to be anywhere on the census.

Gerry

jmurphy · Post by **jmurphy** » 08 Apr 2009 16:45

I found my father's family on the US Census by looking at the images directly (the spelling / index was not what I had expected).

Yesterday I spotted a note on Ancestry that they had updated the 1851 Census of England and 1851 Census of Wales, so I fired up Family Historian, looked at my Named List of the people for whom I had no 1851 Census records, and started working my way down the list.

In the case of the one of my 'missing persons' from 1851, he is not with his parents' family -- I 'walked' through the images, checked the entire village and he is not there.

Next time out, I'll try Steve Morse's One-Step Web Pages and change things up -- perhaps I'll find the magic combination of elements that will work.

http://www.stevemorse.org/census/uk.html

Jan

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