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From: "Eric Youle" <>
Subject: Re: [SHEFF] Help with 1837 Online
Date: 1 Sep 2003 19:51:46 +1000


G'day Graham
On Mon, 1 Sep 2003 4:54 PM, Graham Wadsworth
<mailto:> wrote:
>I have been intrigued to see the correspondence on this subject as I had a
>look at the site a little while ago and cannot get to grips with it. I am
>interested in researching the WADSWORTH family history and as I
>remember it, I could do a search, for just one quarter, based on the
first
>three letters eg WAD. This produced many pages, just for one quarter and
>it was obvious that only a fraction of these, if any at all would contain
the
>name WADSWORTH. If you do not know the year of the event that you are
>looking for, it would appear to me that you can spend lots of money and
>hours of time trawling through these records for no result. In other words
>if the three letters you have originally put in produces ten pages of
entries,
>does it cost you 10p per page just to check if your name is there?
>
>I have written to 1837 Online to query my understanding of it, but they
>failed to reply, but surely a much more sensible system would be to allow
>for a full name search on similar lines to FreeBMD.
>
>Have I completely misunderstood the workings of 1837 Online? I would be
>interested to learn of the experiences of other users of this site.

No you have basically understood the working of the site. To perform the
search as you suggest (viz FreeBMD) virtually requires the full
transcription of the BMD data. 1837 are providing images of the actual
index together with a text based index which cannot resolve down to the
individual surnames.

Although this might suggest one would have to download and pay for many
pages, for each quarter, before you found the one you wanted. in practice
one can quickly estimate how far into the page range you need to step in
order to find the surname you are seeking, with a little practice you can
get within a page or so of your target, so one does not waste too many
downloads. Still having said that it can get expensive if you don't have a
good idea of the data, of the event you seek.





Eric Youle,
Mooloolaba,
Queensland
<<<<<<<<<<<<
Genealogical databases & Sheffield Local History material @
<www.youle.id.au>
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@ <worldconnect.genealogy.rootsweb.com/>



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