FindMyPast is of most interest to me as they have two sets of records that Ancestry don't have:
- Parish Registers for every parish - they are working with the Family History Societies to add all the transcribed parish registers onto their system. Many for Cambridgeshire are already there!
- The National Burial Index - the latest version is only available through FindMyPast.
At the moment I am restricting my interest and research to England only as I've not got my own subscription at present and it'd be too hard (aka expensive) to do too much research abroad. I'm lucky that nobody in my direct upline went abroad!
Over the coming months/years more libraries will be offering free FindMyPast access. For now, as it's fairly new, there are few. Some libraries offer no access, others will sell you £5 PAYG vouchers. But I am keen to tap into those libraries that offer the free subscriptions to FindMyPast.
The access is organised at a county/administrative level, this means that you might be lucky enough to commute across 2-3 library areas and manage to fit a visit to the right library into your schedule, whether that's on the way to/from work, or when you go shopping, or even on holiday!
I have already identified two areas that has free Ancestry AND free FindMyPast!
Of course, most libraries do limit you to just one hour on their PCs, but if you're organised enough you can produce a list of exactly what you're after and just hammer away like a madman for one hour to get it all.
Of course, using a free FindMyPast weekend would be more convenient - so I'll look out for these too, but they're quite rare and at short notice (meaning you're probably already busy that weekend!).
Check your library area now - just in case it's offering free access to FindMyPast.
Cambridgeshire libraries offer free FindMyPast and free Ancestry - with some PCs giving you two hours at a time! There is a limit to the number of people that can be logged on to FMP at any one time though, so you might have to be patient. Cambridgeshire libraries also offer free unlimited Wifi. Unfortunately, although I am researching Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire, it's where I used to live, so I can't avail myself of these free subscriptions :(
Cambridgeshire library users can also download copy of "Your Family Tree" magazine for free.
At some point I'll make a list of libraries that offer Findmypast and Ancestry access for free.... but not today! It'll probably take the fat end of a whole day to compile, check and type up :)
No comments:
Post a Comment