General Chat

I've found Ancestry.com brilliant, it has most censuses exept 1881 which is free on the Latter Day Saints site. It cost me about £25 for a quarter and has saved me hours of work. It also has the National Registry Data.

Hi, 1837online is the GRO index scanned and put online. It's not their fault you don't get information about parents. I think it's wonderful. I've spent hours in the LDS going through the GRO fiche and I'm happy to save time by spending some money and doing it online. For dates I have no idea of I still used the fiche at the LDS, which anyone can do, who doesn't want to spend money on 1837. You can always apply for the cert saying you only want it if the father is **** then you are only charged for a search. Gwynne

1837 really annoYS me as you have nothing to prove that the personal details of the name you are looking up are in fact the person you are really seeking. You get no father or mother of said person and no way of viewing the Cert before you buy. I don't think they should be so close with the information they have to offer. Frustrated Rose

Some people are never happy are they ? Personally I think the 1837 site is an excellent resource and has helped me tremendously. Yes, you have to pay but very few things in this life are free my friends. They are currently improving the site, and you can now search on forename and surname for each quarter, rather than the first three letters of the surname. I used it last night and for the cost of bottle of beer I solved 2 of my brickwalls. NB yes it does seem that it's been down today.

With regard to the 1901 census - Once you have found the person you want you only pay 75p for the page. I have never had to pay the 50p to look at the person first. Also, did you know that you can obtain cards from main libraries that last 6 months from when you first use them so that you don't have to wait until you want 6 pages and one person search to pay. Chrissie

I agree that it can be expensive, however, when you count the cost of fares to London to consult the indexes, not to mention the inconvience of having to travel with all the problems that arises today with late trains etc etc, then the site is very convenient, and now of course, its possible to type in the full surname and not just three letters, that did make it more expensive, so having the new improvement makes a difference financially, and of course the added bonus is I have found, that if the certificate is ordered on line, it actually arrives quicker, than if the order is placed in person in London, so it does have SOME benefits. Of course as you no doubt all know, it is imperitive really to obtain confirmation via certs, so it is a great really having access to the indexes on line. In the past years my son had to spend many hours trawling through heavy index books in London, and could arrive home quite exhausted, not to mention the expense of fares and having to buy a lunch etc to keep going all day, and also then, having to trawl through the various census records (many of which are now available on line) and humph home copies, a large amount of these can be quite a weight, so we are very grateful that now its possible to obtain so much info on line, there was not so much available years ago

I agree that it can be expensive, however, when you count the cost of fares to London to consult the indexes, not to mention the inconvience of having to travel with all the problems that arises today with late trains etc etc, then the site is very convenient, and now of course, its possible to type in the full surname and not just three letters, that did make it more expensive, so having the new improvement makes a difference financially, and of course the added bonus is I have found, that if the certificate is ordered on line, it actually arrives quicker, than if the order is placed in person in London, so it does have SOME benefits. Of course as you no doubt all know, it is imperitive really to obtain confirmation via certs, so it is a great really having access to the indexes on line. In the past years my son had to spend many hours trawling through heavy index books in London, and could arrive home quite exhausted, not to mention the expense of fares and having to buy a lunch etc to keep going all day, and also then, having to trawl through the various census records (many of which are now available on line) and humph home copies, a large amount of these can be quite a weight, so we are very grateful that now its possible to obtain so much info on line, there was not so much available years ago

Brian is right about time and money to use 1837 online, you can run away with your credits in no time. Much of the trouble is that it is not a proper database and you have to do too much guessing on which page to look at. I don't think it is good value for money, but what else have we got? 1901 census is even more expensive. The fees page says that it costs 75p a page to view the sheet, but you have to put an individuals name in to get to a sheet and they charge you 50p for that. Therefore you pay £1.25 to print off one page of an enumerator's sheet for this census. I think that this is nothing more than a money-making scheme for this government depertment. It is certainly not a good genealogical service.

1837online is an index of births marriages and deaths which has been up and running for a couple of months. Personally, I find it a pain and expensive to use because it is not a searchable database like familysearch, or even a seachable quarterly index like freebmd. For the earlier years it can only be searched A to Z for each quarter and can return 500 or so possible pages and you have to guess which page matches the part of the alphabet you want. Each time you guess wrong it costs you time and money. To view the index sheets it needs a special program which can be downloaded free. I have downloaded it at work, but am stuck at home.

It's a pity that they don't give the option to use one of the standard programs like Adobe Acrobat, even if the functions would be more limited. The help desk there still hasn't responded after a week. At this rate the time limit for my fiver is going to run out before I can use it all!

Brian I understand now. It is just a program to enable you to view what is on the site - nothing like the 1901 DeCoder. Thanks Vera, Manchester, LAN

If you go onto the 1837 site the DjVu download is a link on the left of the screen.

Is the special program to read the 1837online index sheets similar to the 1901 DeCoder? If so, can you give me details, please, of where to find it and how it works? Thanks, Vera, Manchester