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This is cross-posted from Celia Heritage's blog. Celia is a Tutor with Pharos, a member of AGRA and runs a family history research and teaching business in Kent.
Celia says: "It is my opinion that genealogy websites should provide full source details and coverage dates for each of their databases. They should also clearly state where a database is not yet complete."
While there is a wealth of genealogical and historical data now available online courtesy of websites such as Findmypast, Ancestry, TheGenealogist and FamilySearch it is becoming increasingly difficult to accurately determine what exactly the various databases include and, in some cases where they came from, thanks to the inadequate or inconsistent detailing of their sources.
This is caused by several factors but the main two are as follows:
- A lack of information as to where the information came from and the coverage dates and any gaps within the coverage. Source data should be clearly visible for anyone using the database or at least for anyone who wishes to make the effort to check the details.
- Inaccurate or unhelpful title names indicating complete coverage where coverage is not in fact complete are misleading.
Let us take parish registers as an example. Neither Ancestry nor Findmypast has a complete county-by-county listing of what they hold. If I am searching for a missing baptism, burial or marriage I need to know exactly which parishes for a certain county or counties are available online and for which dates. Once I know this I can work out which are not and will potentially have to be searched in the record office. However, since neither company provides a county-by-county listing of which parish registers they hold it’s not easy to check this.
I emailed Findmypast to ask if they had such a listing on their website as I know that they do sometimes issue such lists when new databases are released. This is the reply I received:
‘We are sorry but the website does not have a full list of coverage for the parish registers. You would have to check the search form for the parish and then carry out a blank search. Once you have done this you can change the results page by clicking the sort order at the top right – relevance. If you change this to ascending/descending you will see the years covered.’
This seems a very long-winded way of established county coverage, especially when they must have such listings in existence! Ancestry collections are better detailed but they still have no means of checking county coverage in one go. Similarly, the Family Search Wiki is a quite good way of determining which parishes have online coverage, but I don’t believe this is entirely up-to-date and this is again not as useful as a county-by county- listing, as each parish has to be searched individually to determine online coverage.
To my knowledge the only major commercial website to offer a county-by-county listing for parish registers is TheGenealogist which has its ‘List of all datasets’ at the bottom of its home and search pages. This provides a full list of which parish registers it offers and the coverage dates for each type of event and, for logged in users, this can also be accessed from the ‘Search’ tab, entitled ‘What’s included in my subscription?’ The list naturally covers all its other datasets too, not just parish registers, although some of the other categories are not as detailed as they should be.
In order to prevent the online world of genealogical sources descending into chaos, I call upon the major genealogy companies to make it quite clear what information their datasets do and do not include. Surely this is not too much to ask?
If you would like to join me in my campaign to encourage companies to improve the quality of their sourcing details and a new openness about which records they do and do not offer, please spread the word and encourage those interested in family history to email the companies concerned as well with this simple request. Let’s start with a request for full county-by-county parish register listings. Please share my blog with the genealogy world and you can also follow my posts on the subject on Twitter @CeliaHeritage and Facebook. Your examples of inadequate source detailing and coverage are most welcome.
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Please let's help Celia achieve her aim!
Helen, Thank you. Yes indeed. The general searches throw up a lot of information, which can be useful, but also very confusing without knowledge of the types of records that were being produced at the time being researched.
Thanks for your input. We will link back to your blog as it looks very useful.
It is definitely quantity over quality.
I think Ancestry is a lot better than FMP for the source information, but it still requires a deep knowledge of the genealogy world to untangle some of what they list, for example very few people will know what the 'Tyler Collection' actually is. They do give its provenance as from the IHGS, yet you need to know that Mr Tyler who compiled the index went around some East Kent parishes simply extracting names that were of interest to him. So it is one of those horribly gappy incomplete indexes and probably shouldn't be used by anyone.
I much prefer to use a single dataset online, such as FreeBMD, where the provenance is known, and there are no results from other datasets muddling me up. The other good one is BMD Registers at http://www.bmdregisters.co.uk/
I am concerned by Nancy's comments, I would have hoped that FreeREG might have been more interested in making sure they were accurate and complete about information.
The only reason I knew that Manchester was better served by Ancestry than by FMP was my familiarity with those websites and my many Lancashire and Manchester ancestors. Because of my Cheshire ancestors, I know FMP is superior if your ancestors were from Cheshire.
I agree it’s good to be able to check the microfilms in the local archive if you can. For one thing, I know that records can be missing even though a website may indicate that they have fully transcribed a parish register.
Several years ago, I searched Family Search for the baptism of an ancestor, George Colebourne born in Mackworth, Derbyshire. Though the parish register at FS apparently covered the right time span, his baptism was missing. Searching the census for other Colebournes born in Mackworth, several others appeared to be missing also. I knew George’s baptism must be there, so I contacted the archive in Derbyshire and asked them for a copy of his baptism – sadly, they said there was no record. It's my guess that, all they did was check on Family Search first, rather than check the microfilm. In the end, I had to buy a CD of the Parish and lo and behold, there was his baptism along with several other Colebournes.
So, as you say, even with a full description of what a parish covers, there’s no guarantee;-)
I have to agree with everything you say. Only a few people really understand the importance of these distinctions, and obviously the customer service departments of FMP and Ancestry do not, but it is really important. It is actually a type of dishonesty on the part of the websites.
Familysearch was excellent at giving the source of their online records, but all that changed when they updated their site a few years ago. It was wonderful to find burials for some of my ancestors, apart from the fact that they only revealed the date and the city, not the cemetery! When I inquired about this, they told me I’d have to go to a family history center :-(
It appears that even The Genealogist's ‘List of all datasets’ page was out of date until prompted by this March 16th article on The Everyday Archivist: https://everydayarchivistblog.wordpress.com/2015/03/16/family-history-websites-which-one/#comments
Personally, though it takes some searching on both FMP and Ancestry, I find that Ancestry is more clear about coverage.
If you don’t do your research, it’s very easy to be MISLED – for instance The Everyday Archivist had listed Manchester parishes under FMP, but as I pointed out…
“ANCESTRY is a MUCH superior source if you need parish registers for Manchester –
Their Manchester baptisms collection contains OVER 60 PARISHES from Abbey Hey to Worsley and cover 1541-1812 and 1813-1915. They also have a separate search for the registers of Manchester Cathedral itself, as well as Non Conformist registers.
Whereas FMP’s Manchester baptisms appear to cover
Giles Shaw Transcripts for Oldham St Mary 1662-1826
John Owen Transcripts for Flixton, Gorton and Newton 1571-1785
This seems rather puny in comparison and they’re only transcripts not actual images that you can search through on Ancestry. So, I really feel that the Manchester registers should be listed under Ancestry not FMP..
….To find out what’s covered on FMP, you have to go to the search for that data set, read the description and then click on ‘Browse the parish’. You’ll see that for ‘Manchester’ baptisms only two parishes appear St. Mary, Oldham and St. Mary’s Oldham.
This is not what you would imagine Manchester to be (more like a little bit of Lancashire) and you would be very disappointed if you signed up to FMP for Manchester registers.”
Finding a particular parish and it’s coverage can take at least 6 clicks from Ancestry’s Parish collections’ page. http://www.ancestry.co.uk/cs/uk/parish?cj=1&sid=skim725X175X67a5c9131555ec71132b8a90d96555af&o_xid=0003662453&o_lid=0003662453&o_sch=Affiliate+External
I want to let you know that your blog is listed in today's Fab Finds post at http://janasgenealogyandfamilyhistory.blogspot.com/2015/09/follow-friday-fab-finds-for-september.html
Have a wonderful weekend!
Guy, I totally agree about subject titles. Why can't we have some kind of standard? This is also a big bug bear of mine at the moment.
And, I am finding it more and more difficult to get across to students the complexity of the sets of records that go to make up Ancestry/Findmypast. Mostly people do not want to hear that they have to do any thinking or go back over their research to corroborate what they have pulled together.