Genealogy Chat

thank you both very much

Why not look at their home pages.....and compare what they offer?

The answer to your original question is a bit like how long is a piece of string. As mentioned, it depends what it is you are looking for, location and period.

There are a number of sites which offer access to the England and Wales census records and BMD registers. All go back to identical source information. The only difference is in ease of use. Also bear in mind that the website search indices and search engines are different for each supplier, and all contain a percentage of errors and omissions. So, sometime you can find something on one site easily, but struggle on a different site.

Just a word of warning - if you use the Genealogist, don't do look-ups for other people. If you are caught out, and apparently they monitor usage for this purpose, and can not prove that they were for your own personal use, then you will be fined £10 for EACH lookup deemed to be for third parties.

Speaking for Ancestry, they are excellent for US records on the World Wide subscription and have a good selection of London PR as well as the usual census and BMD indexes. They have some Australian ER and BMD as well as (mainly) shipping/immigration lists into the US/Canda and the UK. They also hold the WW1 army records which have survived. if you search on the National Archive site, you get linked to Ancestry (fee). You could take up their free 14 trial and cancel before your cc or dc is charged.

Digging around in the Geneologist, it would seem that their English PR cover more of the country than does Ancestry. It seems as if their census records are transcripts rather then Ancestry's transcripts linked to images

i suppose it depends where most of yours haled from and what you want to cover.

does anyone know which of these two have the most extensive records?