Findmypast, 185 Fleet Street, EC4A 2HS, London, GB
Findmypast is a homegrown family history company that helps people discover their origins. It started in the UK but now has millions of customers around the world, who use its family records to trace ancestors, build family trees and contact distant relatives.
So far I am tracing everything for free. It is rather frustrating but I intend to trial it in the New Year
The free family tree tool is of such poor quality as to render it useless. To start with there is no dedicated explanatory how to use the tree building tool. The tool is messy and doesn't work properly when you try to add family members. The ones that do get added get bizarre ages displayed next to them - a person born in 1993 is apparently 24, and their sibling born in 1995 is shown age of 36! The site keeps trying to offer publicly available birth records as "matches" - problem is, if you accept them, the exact correct birth date that you already entered for your family member turns into a "born sometime in..." which is nowhere near it. Example: you enter a correct birth date of 01.01 1990 and accept a "public birth record", which turns your entry into "March 1990"! Out of 3 children that I've tried to enter, I've managed to get one to appear on the tree, the others it won't display no matter what. The whole program is littered with bad code and is too infuriating to be of any use whatsoever. Tried the app in the hope it'd be better - it turned out to be full of useless self-ads and not much else. A waste of time all round.
Discovering additional information regarding my family. I am finding interesting information in the newspapers. I always wondered what had caused my great grandfather to move to North Wales from Gloucestershire. A newspaper article revealed that he had been involved in a robbery from a butcher's where he had taken hams, bacon and other food items. I am investigating the motive for this and suspect he was probably starving. Nevertheless, I suspect he moved to North Wales to start a new life. In North Wales, he worked firstly as a butcher, then owned his own shop and then became a farmer. He was a respectable businessman when he died aged 83
expense for the service
Was given a gift voucher for this site but absolutely useless as does not contain Scottish Births, Marriages which is what I need.
Great way to get 'real' answers about our ancestors. Not too expensive and plenty areas to look up - birth, baptisms, marriages, deaths, probate, census, newspapers, and many more.
Great coverage of newspapers in the eighteenth century, an era in which I am very interested. Your search engines return very helpful information.
It's getting quite complicated to use the site. Changes are being made, even though they are not really needed. No need to contact other members. And the price is rather high for what you get.
Difficult site to use, lack of instructions, would not recommend
Constantly email useful hints which enable family tree to grow. Massive information resources, records, archives, newspapers. They even trawl newspapers to find relevant info.
Births Deaths & Marriage I have typed in accurate details of relatives and have not managed to obtain a single date only no information available I’m very disappointed
After several months use I only recently found the family tree option and it links everything together. The suggested links have been helpful in letting me expand my family tree and find more information.
I have enjoyed your service, however; I think it’s hard to follow finding research and looking up information, before your subscription expires for the month. Because of that, idk if I will renew for another month.
I find it difficult to navigate the records and the screen seems to lock up at times making research tedious.
seems to be too complicated. too many boxes to fill in
I found it slightly frustrating- couldn’t really search what I needed. Not particularly comfortable with technology though so that doesn’t help.
I started setting up my family tree then it got stuck and can’t get back into it so looking for another site to help with my family tree
I cannot get to grips with your system at all! It seems you have to know everything about your ancestors before you can use it...
Much too expensive!!!! You would have more custom if your prices were a lot lower
The website is simple and easy to use and the amount of information available makes it easy to track your Ancestors' lives, the hints system is a great help in getting started or when struggling with a time gap.
