General Chat

Hi, I have been a member for some years now although I have not used the site recently. I pay £34.95 every 6 months and my page is headed Gold member. If I upgrade to Platinum at £80.04 for a year , what extra do I get. At present I am unable to confirm searches are bringing up the correct matches, as Birth marriage and death do not appear to indicate the person's parentage etc. Thanks

Click here to see what you would get

http://www.genesreunited.co.uk/payments/subscription

I think from your question you are hoping to see parent's names for example onan image of a birth cert? You won't get that, you will find the reference numbers to order a copy from the GRO. However you would find on births after 1911 the mother's maiden name is shown. I use freebmd for that.

Hi Alan, welcome to the boards.

Personally I would just have the standard membership to Genes and another subscription to Findmypast for research purposes as Genes don't hold any records themselves.

You can usually get a 14 day free trial to Findmypast and if you use a site like Quidco (which is a cash back site) then you get something like 20% off the subscription to Findmypast if you go through them.

I can't advise what you get extra for a Platinum membership as I have never used the records on Genes.

The BMD indexes don't tell you a person's parents - you have to buy the certificate for that. The birth indexes after July 1911 will give you the mother's maiden name but only the certificate will give you full details.

Kath. x

By and large the mother's maiden name can be deduced by cross referencing BMD with census data obviating the need to fork out £ 9.25 for a birth cert. Marriage certs. are better value for money as they have the witness names. The witnesses more often than not are rellies. Ancestry has the church records which give a lot of info when available far more than the cert.

If you are researching a tree with significant content outside of the UK then both GR & FMP are a bit of a waste of time. Either fork out for Ancestry or do as many do and post search requests on GR "Find ancestors".

Church BMD records can be obtained free from http://www.familysearch.org.
This site used to have a bad reputation due to holding thousands of made up records "witnessed" by Mormons. These "submitted" records are now hidden in a hole.

Another excellent free site for early records is
http://www.freereg.org.uk
The width and accuracy of the data is super but they have a long way to go for coverage.

An excellent free site for England and Wales BMD records 1837- is
http://www.freebmd.org.uk
but note it is far from definitive with a lot of records missing and transcription errors. The version on Ancestry seems to be more complete.

Thanks very much Rambling Rose, KathleenBell, and RolloTheRed for your comments and suggestions :-) :-)