Family Historian User Group

Greetings all.  Still very new to finding my roots but would welcome help with the following.  Have received today an offer from 1837 online promoting annual fee £59 for accessing their BMD and census records.  Offer runs out 11/09/06.  If anyone has used their services I would be grateful for comments before making up my mind.
Any help appreciated

ID:1813

Sorry can't help on that one, I have ancestry.co.uk so don't have much cause to use 1837 on a regular basis, when I used to I only used the GRO indexes using the vouchers. FH V3 comes with a free voucher for them so it might be worth trying them out using that first.

I use the 1837online - it is quite good. you have to remember that the BMD records are not searchable before 1983 - you can only open the images of the indexes of that surname for each quarter, so if you are doing a long search, you may need to open a lot of images. For a long search, I still prefer to use the books in the family records centre, but it only takes me 45 inutes to get there.
After 1983 it is fully searchable .

I understand that the 1841 and 1871 censuses will be available shortly in addition to the 1861 and 1891 already available.

One feature I have found really useful is the ability to search the electoral roll/telephone book data - you have to purchase extra units for this, but I have found the current address of various distant cousins by using this.

Jeremy

The big plus for me with 1837 is that it DOES have 20th century BMDs - Ancestry (and FreeBMD) haven't got very far through the 20th century at all. Yes, it's tedious looking through the quarterly lists for people if you don't have an approximate date - but having the subscription at least means it's not costing you an arm and a leg to do it! I've made great strides with my C20 ancestors thanks to my 1837 subscription.

treefrog said:
The big plus for me with 1837 is that it DOES have 20th century BMDs - Ancestry (and FreeBMD) haven't got very far through the 20th century at all.

Ancestry has the BMD Index images up to 1983 and searchable index from 1984 to 2004.

Goodness, Nick: thanks for that! I had no idea Ancestry had that data, because when you put in a name on their front page it just takes you to the FreeBMD stuff.

However, 1837 is more searchable, because it takes you to the page(s) that has the surname you want, whereas Ancestry just takes you to the initial and then you have to guess the right page (and it took me ages to find mine!).

Joc Rose

Ancestry also takes you to the image page containing the name you want - or rather it takes you to the page which might contain it, giving you the first and last names on the page. Of course if you don't know the date you have to look at each quarter but is a lot faster than fiddling with a microfiche viewer.

I have found a most of what I wanted on Ancestry. The only ones I have got stuck with were where they may have been born abroad because the parents were in the armed forces.
I asked at the National Family History fair on Saturday and there are plans to add these overseas records to Ancestry.
They are also adding records of WW1 soldiers. I think this in association with the National Archives as one of the staff from there said they are working to put these online hopefully by the end of 2008.
Online records are much better now than when I first started researching,but they do have gaps.

Having a subscription to Ancestry already for the censuses, we gave up using 1837 when Ancestry got the BMD index images. Generally we find them easier to use, and at no extra charge.

However, if you don't find a page for the name you're looking for in a particular quarter it may be because when they transcribed the first and last names on each page it didn't occur to them that the last physical name on a page often belongs half way up and has been added at the bottom as a correction or insert, so any names after that one alphebetically are not found. It's often worth removing letters from the end of the surname until you find a page, and then browsing forwards to the name you want.