ancestry.co.uk

Ancestry.co.uk used to be the clear market leader in online genealogical research. However it is now slipping in my opinion behind the rival service offered by Find My Past. My reasons for thinking this are as follows. Firstly there is the slow progress being made on adding the 1911 census. Secondly there is the recent pattern of putting on partial databases such as the recent railway workers database or the Irish parish record database and then failing to make it clear from the very outset that large chunks of relevant data has not been digitised. For example the coverage of the railway workers database excludes large companies such as the Great Eastern Railway and the recent Irish parish records database in reality covers only a fraction of the counties of Ireland (it is based on some freely available LDS transcripts). I would have less of a complaint about this if it was made clear in the way that Find My Past does that the database was incomplete, with dates given for updates and eventual completion (as happened on Find My Past with the British Army records database), but Ancestry does not do this. Marketing tends to mean that that headline descriptions are written as if the database is complete. Secondly the search facility is not very good, searches often bring up poor matches based upon a star rating system that gets per-pay view customers to waste credits looking for highly unlikely matches. Ancestry.co.uk used to be my website of choice, but it now needs to address these issues.