Genealogy Discounts and Freebies

Here are three great offers for family historians.

1. Ancestry:   Up to and including 8 June 2015 there is free access to Ancestry's UK and Irish records.


2. FindMyPast for $1:   New customers can get a one-month World subscription to FindMyPast for just $1 or £1 or €1, depending on whether you join via their Australia/NZ, United Kingdom, Ireland or USA site.
   
   The subscription gives you access to over 2 billion records worldwide (indexes, transcriptions and images of original documents). They include millions of birth, marriage, death and census records; the largest online collection of Irish family history records; more than 10 million British newspaper pages from as long ago as 1710; lots of records for Queensland; and much more. You have until 23:59pm on Tuesday 30 June 2015 to take up this offer. Terms and conditions are on the Web pages. You can un-tick 'auto-renew' on your My Account page.
   
   Some of the reasons why I like FindMyPast are listed here.


3. Genealogy seminar in Atherton, Qld:   There is free admission to my talks at Atherton Library on Friday 19 Jun 2015. The topics are 'Not Just the Patient: How Hospital and Asylum Records Tell the Story of a Family' and 'Ancestors who Moved or Vanished'. Get more details or make a booking.

(This post first appeared on http://updatesgenie.blogspot.com.au/2014/08/genealogy-discounts-and-freebies.html.)
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No.30 (genealogy worldwide)

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• Discounts & freebies:  Take advantage of the many genealogy discounts and freebies currently available. Some are only offered during August (National Family History Month).


• Mental asylum patients:
  1. I have started indexing three new sources. One includes people who were mentally ill but not actually sent to an asylum. When I've indexed the new records, links will be added to the 'Insanity' page on my Website, so you may want to use the ChangeDetection bar there.
  2. I've added more names of escaped mental patients to my Police Gazettes index.
  
  
• Illegitimate children:  Archival records often identify the father of an illegitimate child even if the birth certificate doesn't. I've added more names (some babies and some mothers) to the 'Illegitimate' page on my Web site.


• Dropbox:  I use the free version of Dropbox for sharing documents and images, and as an additional off-site backup.


• Banana Shire:  Records recently deposited at Qld State Archives include rate books and valuation registers from Banana Shire Council.  (My 'Genealogy Articles' page has a link to Local Government Records and Family History.)


• State Library info-guides:  State Library of Queensland has free family history Info-Guides on many topics.


• Moreton Bay history:  Peel Island - Paradise or Prison? (the history of the Quarantine Station and Lazaret/Leprosarium) and Moreton Bay People: the complete collection are now available as e-books.


• CuriousFox:  Tips on using CuriousFox, a genealogy message system and gazetteer for the United Kingdom, Ireland and USA.


• NSW prison records:  Many interstate folk were in NSW prisons. NSW gaol description and entrance books 1818-1930, which include descriptions of prisoners and some photographs, are now on Ancestry.


• South Australia:  South Australian passenger lists 1847-1886 have been added to FindMyPast. Some of these immigrants moved on to other States.


• Victoria:  55,000 images have been added to Ancestry's lists of assisted and unassisted passengers arriving in Victoria from the United Kingdom, New Zealand and other foreign ports.


• West Yorkshire & Cleveland:  Over 28,000 new baptism records from West Yorkshire and 150,000 National Burial Index records from Cleveland are now online.


• Prisoners of war:  Records for 1914-1918 & 1939-1945 prisoners of war are online.


• Treble Almanac (Ireland):  The Treble Almanac 1818, with transcripts and images of 17,870 records from all 32 Irish counties, has recently gone online.


• Church of Ireland parish registers:  Download a table showing what baptism, marriage and burial registers exist, where they are, and dates covered.


• Recommended reading:
  • James Tanner's warning about newspapers.
  
  
  • Did your ancestors play sport?
  
  
  • World War I photos.
  
  
  • Genealogy Research in Spain.

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FindMyPast's World Records discount offer

FindMyPast's logo

A one-month 'world' subscription to FindMyPast is just $5 (usually $19.95) for new subscribers who pay before midnight on 1 Sep 2014.

The world subscription gives you access to more than 1.5 billion family history records for Australia, New Zealand, Britain, Ireland, the USA and Canada.

If you do not want your subscription to automatically renew at the normal price after your initial period, un-tick the 'auto-renew my subscription' box in the My Account section of the site.

You may want to read why I use and recommend FindMyPast.

(This post also appears in Genealogy Leftovers.)