"Genbires-Networking" - 5 new articles
Lost Cousins - "free" offer until 7 MayLost Cousins are offering subscription services for free up until May 7 2007. Normally if your antecedents from the 1881 census match someone else's you can only get in touch with them if you are a subscriber. But for this short period you can contact your "matches" without a subscription.  British-Genealogy.com
British-Genealogy.com is a free to register message board site, organised into main Boards on Archive CD-Books, Family History, History Topics, and Software and Computing. The Family History Boards are broken down into sub-Boards - Place Forums, Specific and General Family History Topics, and a User Group for The Master Genealogist software.
There is a private message system (maximum of 50 messages). You can set out (briefly) your research interests and your family history website URL in your member profile. The main site (through which you reach the Forums) features some helpful material on resources for family history research. The British-Genealogy.com forums were started in September 2004, and since then the site has registered over 15,000 members who have made almost 100,000 postings on over 19,000 threads. The Forums replaced a mailing-list system which appears now to have been discontinued. What do you think about British-Genealogy.com – is it worth using, have you had success stories, are there any catches etc? Please leave a comment.  Get e-mails about updates to this siteWant to keep abreast with new resources and other updates to this site? Subscribe to my e-mail feed service at the top of the right-hand column.  Genes Reunited
Genes Reunited works on a very simple concept – put your family tree on-line with them and seek to match the people on your tree with those held on the Genes Reunited database.
You can build your family tree name by name, or you can upload a gedcom file from your computer. You can also download your tree from GR to your own computer. You can search the family tree database by surname and first name and/or year of birth and/or place of birth. The site says it currently has over 110 million names on 6 million trees. The data in these trees has of course been supplied by other GR members, so cannot be viewed as a substitute for official records. It is free to register, but if you want to make contact with another member or use many of the other services available, you need to be a paying member – currently a six-monthly subscription is £9.95; existing members have in the past been given a discount to renew, and there is currently no indication that this arrangement will cease. All correspondence is managed by the site – so e-mail addresses are not disclosed to those you contact unless you wish to do so. You can share your tree with other members you are in contact with. The site generates, on a regular basis, a set of Hot Matches – names with birth years that match with your tree. Unfortunately these computer generated searches do not discriminate between birth places so many of these matches can be redundant. The site has a number of message boards – Trying to find lost relatives, Genealogy Tips Board, Records Office Look-ups, and a General Board. There is a portal to the 1901 Census on-line records database (owned by the same company, and reviewed here on GenBIRes), research advice articles, and occasional live webchats with expert Anthony Adolph – and these are archived back as far as 2004. A younger sibling to the better-known internet phenomenon Friends Reunited, the site was officially launched in May 2003 as Genes Connected, changing to its current name in 2004. The best summary provided by the company about how Genes Reunited works can be found here on the Friends Reunited site. What do you think about Genes Reunited – is it worth using, have you had success stories, are there any catches etc? Please leave a comment.  Ancestry Aid
Ancestry Aid is a free to register message board site, organised into an Information area, a Genealogy help area, Surnames of interest, Counties and other areas of interest, Census mis-transcriptions, and a General genealogy Board.
There is a private message system (maximum of 50 messages) and also a chat room. You can place your tree on-line with ancestry aid, and registered members can search these trees. There is also a surname interests register. The site has collected a small number of records for the 1941 census (partial collections for London, Hampshire and Norfolk) and some BMD data.
Ancestry-Aid was started in December 2005, and since then has registered over 6,500 members who have made over 70,000 postings in total on almost 9,000 topics. What do you think about Ancestry Aid – is it worth using, have you had success stories, are there any catches etc? Please leave a comment.  More Recent Articles |
