Saturday, January 28, 2012

Is CensusRecords.com the new brightsolid USA Venture?

...
The Scottish company brightsolid  has said that there would be a major announcement about a new USA venture at RootsTech 2012.

Who will be the Product Manager for this venture?  I think that it will be D. Joshua Taylor, formerly at the New England Historic Genealogical Society.  He is listed with a brightsolid email address on his syllabus articles for RootsTech 2012, and as a Business Development Manager in the FGS Conference brochure.

What is the new product for the U.S. market?

Tamura Jones broke the news about the brightsolid www.CensusRecords.com website on his Modern Software Experience blog yesterday in http://www.tamurajones.net/BrightsolidintroducesCensusRecords.com.xhtml.  Read Tamura's post for details.

The Genealogy In Time magazine dated January 2012 apparently picked up on Tamura's post, and wrote:


"US – A major new genealogy website has just quietly and unofficially been launched. It is from the Scottish genealogy company brightsolid. It clearly shows the company has moved into the US genealogy market in a big way. The company has yet to make an official announcement, but the website is called CensusRecords.com As the name implies, this website is all about US census records."


The new brightsolid website is  www.CensusRecords.com:






The site says:


"Find your ancestors using the U.S. census:


"A historical record of the entire U.S. population, the census is the nation’s largest record set for family history and genealogy. Taken every ten years, from 1790 to the present day, each entry provides a unique snapshot of the lives of your ancestors.


"censusrecords.com brings this vast resource to you online, allowing you to quickly to discover your family history."


The site offers either a pay-per-view option or a subscription option, similar to other brightsolid commercial genealogy websites (like FindMyPast.co.uk).  




The pay-per-view cost is $7.95 for 1,000 credits (payable by credit or debit card) usable for 60 days.  This option is explained at https://www.censusrecords.com/payments/creditsexplained.  Basically, to view a census record will cost you 40 cents for each view (20 views for $7.95).

The subscription costs are:

*  A 12-month subscription is $34.95
*  A 6-month subscription is $24.95
*  A 1-month subscription is $12.95

At present, the www.CensusRecords.com site has these census records available:

*  1790 to 1840:  transcriptions available (for free), images "coming soon"
*  1850, 1880, 1900 transcriptions available (for 50 credits), images "coming soon"
*  1860, 1870, 1920 transcriptions (for 50 credits) "coming soon," images "coming soon"

Search features are described on this page:


It appears that there is a Soundex-like search for a surname in the "Variants" section.  The asterisk (* for zero to any number of letters) ) and question-mark (? for one letter) wild cards are available.  There is an Advanced Search feature, and a "faceted search" feature useful to narrow your search.

Stay tuned!!  RootsTech 2012 is going to be very interesting, I think!

Hat tip to Tamura Jones for the website, to  GenealogyInTime magazine for the news item, and to Chris Paton for catching it on his British GENES blog.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2012/01/is-censusrecordscom-new-brightsolid-usa.html

Copyright (c) Randall J. Seaver, 2012.

Updated 9:30 a.m. to credit Tamura Jones with original find.

1 comment:

Jo said...

Brightsolid also run the ScotlandsPeople website for Scottish records. Very useful for people who can't make it to Edinburgh as you can view/download digitised images of the original documents online. The only restrictions are to births less than 100 years ago, marriages less than 75 and deaths less than 50, for Data Protection purposes :-)