Genealogy Chat

Well, I am going to be a dissenting voice! Firstly, the GRO index pages for BMDs are free on the Ancestry site, you only need to register and don't have to pay at all to see them or even download them. For a UKer, the thing that you're paying for with an Ancestry sub is access to the various census. Now, I'd consider £70 (and it's that, not £60!) to be reasonably good value for the census material... if their search engines weren't so dumb (try using wildcards!), and more importantly if their transcriptions were a hell of a lot more accurate. They appear to be making no effort whatsoever to review and correct their databases, and the feeble correction reporting facility can only append an 'alternative' name to a record. I mean, how dumb do you have to be to get English counties confused with countries in Africa?! Consider also the poor job they've done of indexing the BMD image pages, which just seem to have been run through some OCR software and not double-checked. To me, they have a very poor attitude towards their customers, being more interested in announcing new databases rather than improving the user experience for what's already there. I shall now duck while the brickbats fly!

Andrew i go to my local studies library every saturday, and when i watch people struggling with the BMDs on fische, hard to read, people just dump them back in the draw willy nilly, not for me i would rather have Ancestry with all its faults than not at all, most people soon give up and you dont see them again.

Actually Andrew if you use the 20% offer still available its about £55 for the whole year. ( I got 13 months for that amount recently - dont know if thats still on offer too) I for one could not trawl for hours through fiches, eyes not good enough and I prefer to be in my own surroundings rather than a records office or library, where I have everything to hand and can relax. As a relative newbie, I also find it all a bit intimidating to be surrounded by people who all seem to know much better than me what they are doing! Ive ended up coming home with just a couple of scribbles on a notebook after perhaps 6 hours there. And you cant suddenly jump up and ask someone 'What do you reckon', which you can do on here with all the others who have the ancestry resources. The GRO index is free for a trial period, I believe they mentioned a month? Along with temporary free access to the 1901 census. They do correct mistranscriptions of names within a few weeks. I have advised them of something like 40 names and Ive checked and each one has a note next to it with alternate name. If everyone makes the effort to inform them and it only takes a couple of minutes to do so, then over the year that would be many thousands of corrections made. The corrected name will be shown along with others of the right name. The mistranscriptions of the countries is due to the predictive software they must be using, and is human error - I guess if you are sitting there doing thousands a day, this can only be expected. We all recognise our ancestors were unlikely to have been born in exotic places and to be honest, most of us find this a bit of light amusement. There is no other resource on the net to compare with them. I find if I send them an email I will get a reply at the very latest the following day - I guess it depends on the time in the US. On one occasion I had a reply within minutes and then carried out an almost virtual conversation with their office back and forth until they had sorted out my query.

Andrew, Ancestry would be SOOOO boring without the mistranscriptions!!! Imagine if you could find everyone straight away - where's the fun in that!!????? I love pitting my wits against the transcribers! The branches of my tree that came easily are of little interest to me because they never became ''real people''......those who I have struggled with, on the other hand............etc! Merry

Thats true Merry, isnt it. Some of the people I feel no attachment to at all. Then others that I really struggled to find are so real and I do feel I am related to them!

I appreciate that they're the best we've got. What I'm saying is that they're nowhere near as good as they either should or could be. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect to pay for census transcriptions that are generally accurate! Sure, they annotate records with an 'alternative' name. That's basically the same as sticking a Post-It note on a database! If their database contains incorrect information, then they should correct it. FreeBMD manages to do it, and they're not charging their users a penny. And as I understand it, the 'official' 1901 census site have amended their database on quite a number of occasions to correct errors. Anyway, the alternative name facility only exists for the names proper. Incorrect ages, occupations, and places of birth remain as they are. Ancestry are a business, and as customers we should treat them as such; we pay them for a service, and they should provide it.

Well, they are generally accurate Ive found. And they cant change a name totally because as we all know, we can all have different takes on the original image, - how are they to know if I am right when I tell them their personal take on it is wrong? I think they do the best they can do by pointing out someone has submitted an alternative. And they put the 'incorrect' name with the logo showing an alternative along with the listings of 'correct' names. Thats what Ive found anyway.

Andrew I understand your comments and yes I get cross about mistranscriptions, but the mistranscriptions on the 1861 census on 1837online, the 1881 census on the LDS site and the 'official' 1901 census are every bit as bad. And in some cases, they have merely copied the original error made on the census. As someone who subscribes to Ancestry AND who has spent hours trawling through census microfilm at the Family Records Centre, I can say that in some cases I am amazed that anyone can read the originals. And of course, the transcribers can't help the fact that many of our ancestors change their names, spellings, birthplaces and ages from census to census! nell