Category: family history

Event: Lessons learned from family history digitisation

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Archives South West Webinar

Lessons learned from family history digitisation

Wednesday 21 April 2021 10.00-12.00

Archives South West is an English regional collaboration of local authority funded services whose vision is to promote collections care and knowledge and to encourage public engagement with the South West’s rich and varied archival heritage.

In recent years, many local authority archive services have worked with family history publishers such as Ancestry and Findmypast to digitise, index and publish popular collections such as parish registers. The costs of the digitisation are met by the publisher whilst the archive service also receives a royalty.

As part of a project looking at the potential of newspaper digitisation, Archives South West have collated lessons learned from previous digitisation projects that used a licensing approach. This project was funded by The National Archives.

This webinar is aimed at local authority archives and library staff in the United Kingdom who are thinking about working with a family history publisher to digitise collections or are renegotiating current contracts.

The webinar will be facilitated by Janet Tall,  Head of Archives, South West Heritage Trust, and Heather Forbes, Head of Archives Service, Gloucestershire Connty Council. Current speakers include:

– Kevin Bolton, independent consultant: lessons learned from the South West.

– Kim Collis, County Archivist, West Glamorgan Archives: the Welsh parish registers digitisation project.

– Larysa Bolton, Heritage Collections Manager, Manchester Central Library: the Greater Manchester Archives and Local Studies Partnership approach to family history digitisation.

There will also be an opportunity for questions and a general discussion.

The webinar is free, but priority will be given to Archives South West members and local authority archives and library staff in the United Kingdom.

The webinar will take place on Zoom, login details will be sent nearer to the event. To register, please visit https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/archives-south-west-lessons-learned-from-family-history-digitisation-tickets-141261185007

For more information, contact Kevin Bolton at kevin@kevinjbolton.com

Toolkit: Subscription websites

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Many public libraries have subscriptions to websites such as Ancestry, Find My Past, The Genealogist, and the British Newspaper Archive.

Sometimes, library subscriptions are part of a contract between the website and the library or archives service as part of an agreement to digitise name-rich records. Alternatively, libraries may subscribe by paying an annual fee directly to the company or via a licensing agent. 

All of the sites apart from The Genealogist offer a pricing module for unlimited concurrent access. The Genealogist’s pricing module is on a “per seat” basis so is limited to a particular number of concurrent logins. 

Access is usually via IP address (networked computers and WiFi) rather than logging on via a user name and password. 

Ancestry, Find My Past and The Genealogist all have birth, marriage and death indexes and UK census records. If you have to choose one site, it may be sensible to select the one that has the best coverage of parish registers for your local area.

Ancestry Library Edition

Probably the best known of the family history subscription sites, Ancestry was founded in 1996 and has its headquarters in the United States.

Individual personal subscribers to Ancestry have different subscription levels available – Essentials (Key UK records), Premium (All UK & Ireland records), Worldwide, and All Access (includes external sites Fold3 (military records) and Newspapers.com). 

Libraries are able to subscribe to Ancestry Library Edition, which is similar to a personal Worldwide subscription, but gives read-only access to family trees (it’s not possible to contact other users) and it’s not possible to submit corrections of transcribed data.

New military records are being indexed on Ancestry but transcriptions and images are only available on the separate Fold3 website, which is not included with Ancestry Library Edition.

Its particular strength is the number of databases, including its wide geographic coverage. It has different search functionality from Find My Past, notably allowing more search options for co-resident family member on census returns. Unlike Find My Past, it doesn’t have a separate address search for census returns, but it does have a census browse feature which also includes the enumerator’s sheet at the beginning of each enumeration district (unlike the census images on Find My Past).

Ancestry provides various resources, including posters and online training guides – LibGuides – on its Resources page.

How to subscribe? 

Ancestry Library Edition is exclusively available via subscription agent ProQuest and a free trial is available before purchase. 

Find My Past Community Edition 

Find My Past (FMP) is a UK-based site and is owned by DC Thompson.

Individual personal subscribers to Find My Past (FMP) have the options of three different subscriptions – Starter (basis records such as birth, marriage and death indexes and census returns), Plus (all GB records) and Pro (worldwide records, plus the British Newspaper Archive, searchable only from within FMP).

The Community Edition available to libraries is offered as UK only (excluding Irish records) or Worldwide. Neither of the options includes the British Newspaper Archive (BNA), although a discount to the BNA is usually available for subscribers to the Community Edition of FMP.

Find My Past has greater search functionality for the 1939 Register, including a map/address search, and also allows address search for census records. It also has some of the revised GRO birth and death indexes, which include additional information such as middle names rather than initials, mother’s maiden name before 1911 and age at death before 1866. Find My Past also includes the GRO overseas indexes.

New record sets are announced each week as Find My Past Fridays on the Find My Past blog. 

Find My Past will have exclusive access to the 1921 census when it becomes available in January 2022. However, if previous pricing models are followed, it is likely that this will not be included in any subscription packages to begin with and that all users, even individual personal subscribers, will have to pay to view records.

How to subscribe?

Find My Past offers two levels of Community Edition – UK records (excluding Ireland) or Worldwide (including Ireland, USA, Canada and Australia).

Library subscriptions are via JCS Online: email info@jcsonlineresources.org or phone: 01865 987211

British Newspaper Archive Community Edition

Find My Past is a sister site to the British Newspaper Archive (BNA) and a discount to the BNA may be available to library subscribers of Find My Past.

Unlike all of the other sites, library customers have to have register with the BNA and log in with their own account, even when connected to the library’s computer network. 

Although this may be irritating for some customers, it does mean that customers can log into the site from home, search the site and bookmark any articles that look useful. Then, on their next visit to the library, customers can log into their BNA account and then view their bookmarked articles.

Library subscriptions are via JCS Online: email info@jcsonlineresources.org or phone: 01865 987211

The Genealogist

The Genealogist is run by Genealogy Supplies (Jersey) Ltd, which is part of Wiltshire-based S&N Genealogy Supplies. The company was founded in 1992 and became a publisher of family history data on CD. The Genealogist was established in 2006 as a subscription site.

Individual personal subscribers may choose from three levels of subscription – Starter, Gold, and Diamond, with the first two being available as a six- or 12-month subscription, but the Diamond subscription is only available as a 12-month subscription. 

Libraries may opt for a Gold or Diamond subscription, with the latter being the one most likely to include databases not available on other sites, notably tithe records, map explorer. The site also has a range of wills and non-conformist records.

Library subscriptions are available by contacting The Genealogist directly: https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/contact/

A month’s free trial is available to public libraries and archives.

FamilySearch

Although not a subscription site, as such, FamilySearch offers additional functionality to researchers accessing the site at a Family Search Affiliate Library. 

FamilySearch is part of the genealogical arm of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), often called the Mormon church. The church has been microfilming and, more recently, digitising name-rich records from around the world and making them available to researchers. Most of the records are searchable on www.familysearch.org.

Individual researchers need to have their own free account with FamilySearch and may search transcribed and indexed records free of charge from any location. However, when searching at a FamilySearch Affiliate Library, researchers have access to many (though not all) digitised records as well as the searchable indexes and transcripts. These images are otherwise only accessible at one of the church’s Family History Centres.

Affiliate Libraries used to have the facility of ordering copies of LDS microfilms, but this ordering service was withdrawn in 2017. Since this date, Affiliate Libraries have been able to access digitised images on FamilySearch, provided that the custodian of the original records has not restricted access to Family History Centres only.

Public libraries may become FamilySearch Affiliate Libraries free of charge on completion of  a signed contract and giving details of a static IP address to FamilySearch. Further details are at https://www.familysearch.org/blog/en/familysearch-affiliate-libraries/

A list of FamilySearch Affiliate Libraries is at https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/FamilySearch_Affiliate_Libraries

Other useful subscription websites

Your authority’s online reference libraries may also subscribe to subscription services that will help with family and local history research. These include national newspapers, such as the Times Digital Archive and the Illustrated London News, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland, Who’s Who, and Who Was Who, many of which will can be accessed from home.

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