General Chat

Sp pleased to see this Sharron. I used the LDS site some time ago when there was no request to "join" Had been hesitant to do so when I had a little look a couple of weeks ago.
You have all set my mind at rest. So will be giving it a go soon.

Thanks Sharron for raising the subject and thanks too to everyone who responded.

Often quite useful for finding siblings of an ancestor and from them their order in the family which sometimes gives a clue as to when the parents married. Sometimes the mother is named which also helps.

I find Family Search very useful for those places that Ancestry & FMP don't cover very well like South Africa.

I had an Ancestor who seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth but then came across a Death Notice source on Ancestry which just gave a name. Following it up on Family Search the Death Notice image had so much information that it couldn't be anyone else but my Ancestor......another piece in the jigsaw :-)

However, the IGI was a revelation in the 1980's, before transcripts came online generally.
The idea was that you found the record in the IGI then looked for the original record in the appropriate place, Church, Record Office etc. I found a lot of my Northumberland folk in this way. I still have the IGI printouts.

There was a local LDS Church with a family history centre attached. I spent a lot of time there, the staff were very helpful. No one mentioned their Church, there was a discreet stack of leaflets and a box for voluntary donations, that's all.
The Fam History Centre eventually closed and moved to a Church 20 mins beyond. I did go there once, but by then records were appearing in online sites.

A long while back FS had what are often called the IGI records.
Some of these were taken from surveys by LDS members of one sort and anather - Bishops Transcripts, gravestones, etc etc. A highly controversial feature of that era was that LDS members could "witness" events and promote dead people to being members of the church of Latter Day Saints and even witness non existent marriages. These "witnessed" marriages were entered into the IGI in the same way as anything else. It really got the goat of Northants who barred access to parish records for all online gen. Given that Americans will believe practically anything and rarely cross check the overall effect of "witnessed" BMD records has caused chaos.

Today the LDS FH has pretty well cleaned up its core database and the main site is reliable. However the IGI records are still there, hidden away, and there remain thousands of trees based on false data.

A group of my rellies became Mormons and prospered mightily in Provo. Around 2005 I was invited to go and see them in Prince and had a very nice ski holiday. Nobody tried to sign me up! Their FH website and history centres are very useful and quite safe. They def. will not result in ernest looking people banging on the door lol.

Much of the UK data on the FS site is also on FMP.

Thank you, everybody.

I have an Account too never had any problems.

Just for info......

After signing in click in Catalog

Then select Place
Enter a town/city/village...there are all sorts of records.

Cemetery, church, poor law, overseers.

Some are accessible on FMP or F/S offices.

Worth looking.

I was just going to say that too Pat :-). I've had an account with them too for a number years and had no problems either. In fact, come to think of it I have two accounts with them...not sure why I did that!

The only thing they asked me if I wanted to do was help with transcribing and indexing their Images which I have done and it was/is quite interesting...but there was absolutely no pressure to do it.

I can't remember what questions they asked to create an account but I don't think they were that intrusive as I'm sure I wouldn't have bothered if they were! Of course, you could always be economical with the truth ;-)

I sign in.

I do have the odd visit from young missionaries, but that is more likely to be proximity to an LDS temple than any connection to the site.

I often use our local LDS Family History Centre and there is never any attempt to convert to their religion. Actually religion is never mentioned.

No one has ever contacted me after I created an account and we have Latter Day Saints here.

Does anybody else use this site?

I had not looked at it for a long time and find that you need to sign in to it now but I am not really keen to create an account with them. There is always the chance they will be round and I am a bit dubious about Latter Day Saints on my doorstep but is there an alternative that doesn't involve trailing around the record offices again?