Genealogy Conference

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American Luke

00:01

Familysearch gets me a lot better results when I work collection-by-collection

Usually I can narrow down a few collections that might have the information I'm looking for, but I don't like using their search-all-collections search unless I have to

2 hours later…

American Luke

02:13

Hey @Verbeia :)

Verbeia

Hi @AmericanLuke

I find that the best strategy is to use Ancestry and FamilySearch in a complementary way. Most of my research is in the British Isles (the post-migration period was already thoroghly researched by other family members).

FamilySearch is very good for Isle of Man records, whereas Ancestry is hopeless.

It is also better for Scotland, though usually you end up having to pay for a few things from ScotlandsPeople.

I've never found findmypast to be much use, but I never subscribed either.

American Luke

I don't think I've ever used findmypast

Verbeia

I could never work out what it added beyond what one already got from the combination of the other two.

I keep trees on Ancestry, as that saves downloading the images into my main tree on my laptop.

American Luke

I take it you have an Ancestry account?

Verbeia

@AmericanLuke, yes, I do. That's where I started.

American Luke

02:18

I'd get one, but it doesn't fit my budget right now

Verbeia

In terms of getting the most out of it, learning what searches are most effective is useful.

It's not cheap, I grant you. I think I will be able to drop down to a Britain and Ireland membership next year. At the moment I have World, but I don't really need more than Britain and Ireland now that I've filled out all the Australian and NZ bits.

American Luke

Can you get just a US, russia, and germany version? :P that's all I'd need

Sometimes I contemplate making a giant list of everything I need and when I have a few weeks of nothing to do getting a free trial account

But I'd never have the time or the organization necessary

Verbeia

You have to be careful with trial memberships - they will convert to a permanent one if you aren't fast enough to cancel before the end of the trial. But cancelling a permanent membership is not hard. My partner also had one and we consolidated on the one account.

American Luke

Especially when I'm researching in the US, I find local collections much more useful than broad collections on the big sites

Verbeia

02:35

I think it really depends on the location of interest. Ancestry is excellent for England, especially now that they are digitising parish and similar records from county archives. West Yorkshire and Lancashire are very good; some of the Home Counties like Berkshire and Oxfordshire less so. But more is coming on line all the time.

American Luke

Yup. Familysearch is pretty good for germany, but stinks for a lot of the US (at least where I research)

Verbeia

FamilySearch is especially good for big-sweep queries, like searching on parents to find all the siblings of your ancestor. That is a very useful strategy to work out roughly when the parents were born, which allows you to narrow down dates for searches on the marriage and birth records of those parents.

18th and early 19th century families were often very large, with the eldest child born as much as 20 years before the youngest. So you need to know the siblings to narrow down the parents' likely birth date.

Ancestry is much better for Census records, so 1850s onwards. In general, the older the record, the more likely it is to be on FamilySearch rather than Ancestry, unless Ancestry has digitised a particular parish all the way back.

American Luke

@Verbeia Definitely

Friday night here, so I'm getting off for the evening. I'll be back tomorrow :)

Verbeia