Friday, April 10, 2009

Checking out FamilyRelatives.com

The web site www.FamilyRelatives.com made a major announcement this week - you can read all about it here. The key graphs were (for me):

"The team at the Family History website Familyrelatives.com is in the final stages of a new website design that will enhance and simplify the way records can be accessed on its website. Previously Familyrelatives' members were able to click on one of two tabs to access records from England and the United States.

"Now with the growth of data sets and the forthcoming addition of records from Australia, New Zealand, England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Canada and the United States it has been necessary to expand the tabs and simplify the website layout to accommodate the growing number of datasets."

I decided to go take a look, since they claimed to have databases from the USA. Here is the home page for www.FamilyRelatives.com:




It is a subscription site, and costs 30 pounds for a year (if you are identified as a USA resident, it is $50 per year). A user could sign up for a number of pay-per-view credits also. Apparently, I registered three years ago for a free account, so I logged in and browsed through the site.

Here is the top of the list for the UK records:



The UK record list includes Civil Registration for Births, Marriages and Deaths; Parish Records (partial); Trade directories; Military Records; University Alumni Records; Irish Records; Land Records; some Australia records too. There are tabs for England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. There are no databases listed yet for Canada, Scotland, Wales or New Zealand.

One free UK database is listed - Overseas Births (1761-1984), which can be browsed (alphabetical, but not in exact order, over 21,000 entries).

There are some USA databases, as shown below:



These include California Birth Index (1905-1995); Texas Marriages; Texas Divorces (1968-2004); Maine Marriages; California Deaths; Maine Deaths; Social Security Death Index; US WW2 Enlistments and POWs; US Korean War Deaths and POWs; Irish Immigration Records (1846-1850).

At this time, all of the USA databases are FREE to access if you have registered with FamilyRelatives.com. I checked the California Birth Index, put in my SEAVER surname, and saw this list of 261 matches:


This is the same information that you receive on Ancestry.com.

The web site also has a family tree area. Here is the screen to start inputting family information:



There is a GEDCOM upload capability. I haven't tested that yet.

As I mentioned, this is a subscription web site. Here is the subscription information page:




Note that this site does not offer some of the typical UK database offerings like Census Records.

For a California resident without an Ancestry subscription, this site would be useful for the free California Birth Index.

For a researcher looking for UK records, some of these databases may be unique to FamilyRelatives.com - I'm not aware enough of what is offered here and on other sites.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Randy, I'm stumped. Recently someone posted a map with a roundup of temple districts in Utah and Idaho that have newFS now or have been notified. Pretty green, purple, red, etc., markers. Was that you? Can you refer me? Thank you! dee.ziegler@mail.com