The Genealogist is a rapidly growing online data subscription service- David Tippey explores what’s available and what’s to come.

The Genealogist, www.TheGenealogist.co.uk, is the rapidly growing online data subscription service operated by S&N Genealogy Supplies and the British Data Archive. Much of its present content complements the British Data Archive's publication of the census for England and Wales on CD-ROM, and takes the form of partial or complete census indexes, plus various full county census transcripts, with some indexes now accompanied by images online.

The Genealogist also includes their excellent BMD index (the complete 167 years of birth, marriage and death records from 1837- which I reviewed in the August issue of Family Tree Magazine). In addition to these records and the growing collection of census material, also available on The Genealogist, is the Crew List Index Project (which lists the crew of vessels between 1863 and 1913), the 1873 Return of the Owners of Land for England and Wales, and the Phillimore's parish record marriage transcripts for London. Further parish records and various trade directories are scheduled to be added in the near future.

The Genealogist website has recently undergone a complete makeover; to make it more user-friendly, although it could still be argued

The new all-inclusive subscriptions offer good value for money if you
want to use a range of databases.

that bringing out all the S&N associated websites together under one identity would be less confusing for users, especially as The Genealogist is so closely linked to the BMD index site. One useful new site feature is the Help Wizard, which covers the frequently asked questions about subscribing or accessing the material.

Census Indexes and transcripts

The Genealogist website was originally set up for the volunteer census indexing project, whereby owners of the British Data Archive CD census sets could transcribe the information from the census to help create an index, in return for use of completed work. This original

You can see the full entry in the Acrobat PDF viewer window.
If you don't have broadband, images can be slow to view.

inclusive subscriptions, which offer excellent value and can cost as little as £4.66 a month (based on a monthly equivalent, when paying an annual subscription in advance (for access to databases that would currently cost over £1,000 as individual subscriptions. With some subscription options you can spread your payment across the year.

Subscribers can use all the current BMD index records and the census products, which currently include 34 partial and 14 complete census indexes or transcripts, plus the 1783 Return of Owners of Land and the 1851 two per cent census (a transcript of about 500,00 people from the 1851 Census for England and Wales). Over the coming months they will be adding more census data, plus trade directories, parish records and other material from their range of data CDs, all of which will be available to subscribers at no additional charge.

The Genealogist service is rapidly growing and maturing and already provides much useful material for family researchers, with more being added all the time. The newly introduced subscriptions that provide access to the census, BMD and other data are a particularly attractive idea, especially as even more information is to be included from their vast CD library.

At present there are many partial census name indexes available, created by the volunteer indexing project, and a lesser number of complete indexes and transcriptions. The priority is to complete more indexes, to complement their census CDs, rather than to try to offer a complete online census image service similar to Ancestry.co.uk. However, images linked to the census indexes will gradually become available- they already are for London 1861, Herefordshire 1901 and Glamorganshire 1841 and 1851.

British Data Archive

The census indexes are the by-product of the publication on CD of the English and Welsh census book images by S&N associate company British Data Archive, whose aim is to make all the census years available on CD for every county, so that they are easily accessible to researchers everywhere. On CD you get access to the census page images when you want it, for all time, at a fixed cost, and- with the wide range of indexes- finding those ancestors becomes ever easier. The coverage on CD is now very good with all counties having at least two census years available (1871 and 1891), most have more, and six counties (London, Lancashire, Yorkshire, Glamorganshire, Herefordshire and Kent) have complete coverage from 1841-1901 except for

1881, which the company now intends to scan too. All images are scanned in-house by a dedicated team, with tight quality control standards and image-enhancing software to get the best results.

They are then produced as portable document format (PDF) images, which can be read by any computer using the free Adobe Acrobat Reader software. Images are normally bitonal (black and white), but greyscale scanning is employed where greater clarity is needed, even though this entails more CDs in the final set.

Licensing

The census CDs are licensed as full sets for personal use only, and this excludes any commercial or library use, loan, or the provision of lookup or print services. The splitting of a set for resale

or sharing is also prohibited. The rigid licensing has been necessary because the copying or splitting of sets for resale in the past has meant that some existing census sets are unlikely to repay the cost of microfilm or the wages of the staff involved in publishing them, thus jeopardising the availability of future releases. Libraries of all kinds, including local history societies, require a special library licence which costs a modest amount compared to the cost of most academic data CDs.

Subscriptions

There are a wide variety of online subscription options to suit all users, and if you only want access to a single database this will usually cost from around £5 a quarter. However, they have now introduced a choice of all-

Results from a search of the two per cent transcript of the 1851
census, which also provides surname mapping facilities. This dataset
transcribed two per cent of the enumerators' books.