Genealogy Forum UK

Hi,

I am posting this on behalf of my sister: despite having searched archives and googled I have not found any answers.

She has spent the last year diligently researching our family tree as best she can on limited resources. A few weeks ago she got some really generous help from a lady she met via genes who looked up some stuff on ancestry.co.uk for her. I know she would like access to this at home - but as a single mum she can't justify it. I have decided to give her £100 for her birthday.

My question is: Is subscribing to Ancestry the "best" way to spend it or are there better options. She has no transport so getting to libraries etc is also difficult. (If relevant our family originates from Dover and Dundee.)

Any help most gratefully received.

Thanks
Graham

I have Ancestry and I do like it.

Having said that others use find my past and like that too...not sure it has all the census info
but it does have 1911 which is very useful.

Others on here have subscriptions to alternative ones Mark I think has the
Genealogist not sure what that offers but it sounds good.

I think you can have a trial on ancestry for a couple of weeks not sure how it works.

The libraries normally offer Ancestry free which is good.

I use 'Findmypast' ...I purchase 280 units fot £25.00, at 3 units per enquiry it works out
quite well. The transcription 'printouts' are very clear and useful for future reference.
If researching 1911...Transcripts are 10 units and original census 30 units, so that comes
expensive. Ancestry is much better at searching BMDs, so I buy a small amount of units
at a time. (£6.95 for 12 searches). I advise buying a small amount of units on different sites
first, to see which works for you.

Overall Ancestry is the best if you are restricted to a single site.

Its range of records is much better than FindMyPast and they have fully indexed the BMD, which FindMyPast have not, and they have reall tree hosting where lotsof people actually help you.

Two plusses to FindMyPast are the 1911 census and the digitisation of the service records from the 1750's onwards. They just released the first batch of service records last week and they are brilliant.

TheGenealogist has the overseas BMD, non-conformist BMD, Marine Deaths and the most accurate transcriptions of the census. Their indexed Parish Records are also excellent.

I know what you mean about limited resources, being a student, but about a month ago I decided to splurge on a subscription. I chose findmypast to get all the census and I use FreeBMD to search for birth, marriage & death records which I personally find easy to use after a bit of practice.

I did the Ancestry free trial about 6 months ago and I did find it easy to use the search feature and found some new information but I dont like the way your tree is set out online and updating everything on there and on my pc would have become very painful, so in the end I decided Ancestry wasnt for me.

Hope this helps.

Amy

If you buy Family Tree Maker 2010 you get a subscription to Ancestry.

You can download your full ancestry tree, including all attached pictures etc, which no other site lets you do.

Everybody else restricts you to a GEDCOM file.

OR

You can do everything on your PC via Family Tree Maker and still have access to all the Ancestry data. NO need to even have your tree online if you don't want to.

You can still join ancestry as a guest and upload a gedcom with your tree on
anyone that views your names in your tree can then contact you
but you can't view their tree as a guest only the named indexes and tree connected.

So you can have your tree on Family tree maker and upload it to lots of sites
such as Tribal pages and Ancestry as a guest.

I am not sure if find my past were offering a trial recently.

many thanks for the advice and sorry for the delay in posting its lurgy season.
Since my dad was born in 1908 and all his siblings were younger - I am thinking the 1911 census would be useful AND
I am not too impressed that Ancestry could not be bothered to answer my sales enquiry.

thanks again.

Why don't you phone the free no on ancstry and speak to a manager
I did that and complained about something and ended up getting a very nice apology from them