Genealogy Reviews - InSites - TheGenealogist.co.uk

May 2006

In Sites

Continuing our series of interviews with the movers and
shakers of the online genealogy world, Sarah Warwick
talks to TheGenealogist.co.uk boss, Nigel Bayley

N igel Bayley knows what family historians want from their computers. Not only is he the managing director of one of the UK’s biggest distributors of family history software, S&N Genealogy, and of its online offshoot, TheGenealogist.co.uk, but he started out as a family historian himself.

He slipped into the business side of things by chance. While investigating his own family tree, which he has plotted all the way back to 1670, he discovered that he couldn’t find the software he needed for his research. “There weren’t any Windows packages available within the UK,” he remembers. “So I had to use some shareware packages. Then I started selling them and the business grew – we started importing good Windows packages like Reunion; then we started publishing data on CDs. Then finally we decided to publish on the internet.”

He takes pride in the fact that he was a family historian first and a businessman second and remains active in the family history community. “We always go to all the family history shows ourselves,” he says. “Sue [his wife] and I go to about 20 a year and always make sure we talk to people. We listen to them and make changes dependent on what they want.”

One example is the recent modifications made to the payment system at TheGenealogist. Online data was originally only available on a pay-as-you-go scheme, but users kept asking for all-inclusive subscriptions so they introduced them in June of last year. The move has certainly paid off. TheGenealogist’s turnover has gone up six-fold and thousands are taking advantage of their new resources, which are available from £58 per year.

“It’s obviously what people wanted,” says Nigel. “It’s better value to have a range of resources rather than buying things individually. Having everything in one place allows people to hop between different sources. If people still just want to access one database then we can do that, but this gives them the option of a lot more information. We can now offer them whatever they want.”

Launching the subscription service has automatically put TheGenealogist into competition with the other giants of the online

research world, Ancestry.co.uk and 1837online.com. Although the site doesn’t yet have the high profile of the other two and its records are not complete for all the census years, Nigel feels they have an edge in other areas - such as user involvement and accuracy.

“We don’t yet have the census sets for the whole country, although we are virtually complete for the 1851 census,” Nigel says. “We also have about 67 per cent of the 1841 census and over half of the 1861 and 1871 censuses. We tend to concentrate on the most popular counties first so for London we are complete for all years, and for Lancashire and

The Genealogist's business has increased six-fold since they brought out all-inclusive subscriptions last year.

Yorkshire we are almost complete. By the end of 2006 we should have the census transcripts complete for all counties from 1841 to 1901.”

TheGenealogist is unique among family history websites as its census returns are checked using a unique ‘voting’ volunteer program. “We originally started a volunteer name indexing project to index our CD sets,” he explains. “But after getting half way through the London 1881 census we decided that the volunteers couldn’t cope with the sheer volume they had to index. So at that point we decided we’d have to transcribe the census fully, so we sent the images off to a company in India.

“Looking at other companies’ problems with this method in the past we knew we really needed to put a quality checking system in place. It seemed apparent that you needed several layers of checking – one in India and another after the records come back to the UK. We set up a system

with a number of software packages designed to look for anomalies in names and relationships. Parallel to that we started the volunteer site, www.ukindexer.co.uk, which allows volunteers to go through the census material as a final check.

“Volunteers are given a page or so of returns at a time. They will check the transcripts against the images and if they see something wrong with them then they flag them up. Another volunteer then checks their work. If there is any conflict between the two checks then one of our staff will look at it and will use additional resources – other years of census, directories or other records – to correct it.”

Case Study

I used TheGenealogist as I had hit a brick wall. I needed clarification for some information I had found on the 1851 census, so I visited the site to look at their 1841 material. I was thoroughly satisfied with their site – it was easy to use and I found what I was looking for straight away. I have recommended it to several of my friends and would definitely use it again.

Susan Britton, Lancashire

Nigel prides his company on having developed the most accurate checking system out there. “We care about quality. We are unique in having such a barrage of checks, both in software and manually, to ensure that all the data we publish is as precise as we can be. We also have integrated reporting so if there are any problems then they can report them straight away online. We have full-time staff to deal with any problems.”

There are additional perks to using the site for census searching. Full

Follow the historical progress of your family name.

transcriptions of the records mean that the searches can be done on all fields, including occupation and relationship to head of household. The full transcriptions also mean that users have to look at fewer images than on other sites and can use the site easily without a broadband connection.

As well as the census results they publish a multitude of other records: all the BMDs for England and Wales, 1837 to 2004, the Philimore Parish records; some pre-1900 parish record transcripts and county records; a number of directories; and specialised indexed such as landowner records and the Knights of England (data from heraldry lists of 1127). Eventually they also plan to upload all the information they currently produce on CD.

As with the census checking, many of the other records get special treatment to ensure they are as accurate as possible. Nigel explained: “We have all the BMD indexes and they are as comprehensive as those on 1837online.com. More so, actually, as we found missing pages on the original microfilm and have gone back to the GRO and re-microfilmed and scanned the original books. We also re-photographed pages that were pages that were very yellow and difficult to read.”

The site also uses GRO databases for BMDs from 1984 onwards to allow users to perform ‘Smart Searches’. This intelligent facility allows users to pursue several additional lines of enquiry. They can search for all children born to a couple, if they specify father’s surname and mother’s maiden

name; see the details for either partner in a marriage; and find a birth record for a corresponding death record. A current project for staff at TheGenealogist is incorporating pre-1984 data into the same database, to allow similar searching of earlier records.

In addition to this, a new mapping software system on the site allows you to see where people with certain surnames were born and lived. “Certain names seem to spread over time from one area – or from ports when people enter the UK,” says Nigel. “It is also very interesting to see people move into London: in the 1841 census you can see that the population is quite low and the outskirts are quite rural but this soon changes. I believe this is one of the reasons why people are interested in family history – understanding something about your own family’s changing wealth and circumstance gives you a unique way of looking at history.”

Nigel’s Top Tips

Find out where in the country your surname is concentrated by using the map feature within the BMDs or the 1851 census.
Use the excellent new research guide to the site, written by Family History Monthly computer expert, David Tippey. Find it at www.thegenealogist.co.uk/researchguide/
When searching the census, use the wildcard (*) after the first three letters to capture the widest range.
Use surname and forename variants to make sure the spelling of a name, or the use of a common form of a name, like Bessie for Elizabeth, isn’t catching you out.
With births, marriages and deaths remember to check the next quarter, in case of a late registration of the event.
Use SmartSearch to find family members in the database records. It will give you all the children for a marriage, or allow you to look at a birth for a person using the info contained in a death record.

“When I was taught history at school family history didn’t come into it. It was difficult to connect to the wider themes that they were teaching. Now with programs such as Who Do You Think You Are? people are being drawn into the study of their own family histories – getting an idea of who their ancestors were in social situations and what affected their lives.”

Although most of TheGenealogist’s users are more experienced researchers, Nigel is putting measures into place to make the site more accessible to the new wave of family historians who are being enticed into the hobby by WDYTYA? and other programmes. “We’ve now put family history guides on the same site,” he says, “and we’re getting a professional writer to write a complete guide to the site from a beginner’s point of view.”

They are working hard on getting this new generation of genealogists interested in what they have to offer, including a free trial on access to the site. “It’s not like other free offers where you have to put your credit card details in and then cancel your subscriptions later,” says Nigel. “Our free trial is absolutely free. All you have to do is put in your name and email address to get access.”

Volunteer at ukindexer.co.uk and you will be rewarded in vouchers for your own research

The trial is for 30 days and users are given ten credits to use within that time, but some of the records – the volunteer indexes and BMD databases – don’t even require credits. If users sign up for a subscription during the free trial they also have the option of a free CD set.

Nigel is also keen to get more people involved in the volunteer project. “There are currently 4,000 volunteers on the site but we are always open for more,” he explains. “They only get a little bit of work at a time – either a page or ten lines – so it’s not onerous. And they get rewards for any

checking they do - mostly vouchers that can be claimed against anything we sell through S&N Genealogy, or credits for access to online resources.” If you are interested in getting involved, all you have to do is visit www.ukindexer.co.uk and enter your details to receive your first task.

And what plans does Nigel have for The Genealogist’s future? “We’ll certainly be expanding our material and we have new spin-off sites coming for new aspects of research,” he says. “We have a lot of material that is still being filtered and cleaned and microfilmed at the moment - there’s a huge amount of information to go up. Plus there are all the directories that we have on CD, in addition to the census transcripts, which should be complete by the end of the year.”

And good news for those hooked on family history - Nigel also wants to make the hobby cheaper!