Tag: sales

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Subscribers can now use both TheGenealogist.co.uk and TheGenealogist.com to access their family history research!

All in one search for family history

This week I have been rather distracted from the enjoyable pass time of looking at my own family history by the needs of my business. Even then, I had to explain to someone in a bank just exactly what it is we do when we set out to research our family tree, in between sorting out some details of my banking with the branch.

I have also spent some time, talking with various contacts about how I take my family history course offer forward in 2014, and receiving advice from some of them looking afresh at my plans.

It is always good to keep moving ahead and so it was with some interest that I heard from the team at TheGenealogist about how they have introduced new technical changes to their business.

Subscribers can now use both TheGenealogist.co.uk and TheGenealogist.com to access their family history research!

With the ever increasing popularity of family history and as a number of their subscribers grow at a healthy pace, TheGenealogist have invested in a number of new core product features to ensure users of their family history website continue to enjoy the maximum reliability they expect.

TheGenealogist – an international brand

Firstly, with increases in sales all over the world, it was felt by the company that it was important to make it as easy as possible to access TheGenealogist and not just through a .co.uk address. The international .com web address will now equally represent TheGenealogist too. Secondly, as the unique search tools and major record set additions over the past few years have really pushed TheGenealogist forward internationally, the background technology has been further developed to continue the reliability of service that is associated with a subscription to TheGenealogist.

Major investment in IT Infrastructure

TheGenealogist say that thier website can now be accessed from both TheGenealogist.co.uk and TheGenealogist.com, held at multiple, geographically separate data centres on super-efficient servers that easily cover the needs of our subscriber base.

They have also ensured that subscribers will continue to get fast and reliable searching facilities from the background IT infrastructure. Something that users, such as myself, are pleased to find is a priority as who likes to hang around waiting for your search to be returned for more than a small amount of time?

Over Christmas, it seems, the new service was given its first major test and coped well with the large increase in workload that resulted in people using the holiday period to log in and do some research.

“The large increase in workload was easily handled by our new multiple data centers and new hardware” said TheGenealogist.

It is easy for a family history website to rest on its laurels and overload systems with large amounts of data and functionality and not anticipate reliability issues. However, TheGenealogist has in place a rigid IT framework ensuring it is well covered for many years to come. A high quality, efficient service will be maintained long into the future.

Mark Bayley, Head of Online Content at TheGenealogist comments: “We constantly strive to improve our service for all our customers. Our increase in user base, services and now free content such as the image archive, has given us the opportunity to redesign our service to be much more resilient to increases in magnitude of users. We have further extended our ability to offer large amounts of records for people to view in a secure and ultra-reliable framework. “

So while they forge ahead I too shall be making some changes to my FamilyHistoryResearcher.com course and to the information available at NoseyGenealogist,com, but maybe not on the investment scale as TheGenealogist has!

The Genealogist - UK census, BMDs and more online

Disclosure: Compensated Affiliate Links are used in this post.

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Family Tree Research is Big Business!

While I was taking a break from researching my family tree I took a look at a finance site this morning. My attention was drawn, because of my interest in Family History, towards a report on Investors.com about a stock that’s been one of the market’s big winners during the past year and a half in the USA.

Read more at:http://www.investors.com/Education/DailyStockAnalysis.aspx?id=576677

It is, of course, Ancestry.com Inc. the group of family history web sites, including Ancestry.co.uk, that many of us use or have probably used in the past to dig into our family tree and dig up things like births, marriages and deaths, census record and more. It became listed in November 2009 and so it is considered to be relatively new to the market.

But already Investors.com reveals that:

” … a lot of people seem to be interested in that information. Sales growth ranged from 36% to 41% during the past four quarters.
* Earnings growth has had some big swings, but came in at a hefty 125% last quarter.
* Looking ahead, analysts see earnings rising 51% this year and 30% next year.
* The stock’s Relative Strength Rating is 96. That rating compares Ancestry’s price performance to the rest of the market. So Ancestry is outperforming 96% of the other stocks in the market.
* Still, its Accumulation/Distribution Rating is a D-. So some big investors have been selling the stock.”

All this shows that, across the world, people like us are so taken by the Family History bug that we are willing to spend money in the pursuit of our hobby.

Now I know, from feed back on my blog and on my facebook page, that some people believe that the subscriptions to sites like these are getting out of their reach. It would seem that the Israeli owned MyHeritage may have understood this trend in the market as it is reported on another website I found called Businessinsider.com, that they are developing a way to share the costs of subscriptions to their site.

MyHeritage, which makes it money from advertising as well as premium subscriptions has a quite clever way of getting family history researchers to pay for premium subscriptions to its site and that is to encourage your friends and family to chip in.

According to Business Insider:

“You can create a “Family Goal” to encourage other family members to subscribe.

This has some precedent, in different ways, in online fundraising campaigns, which encourage donors to reach a goal, and in group buying. Obviously it makes sense in a genealogy site, where a family may be involved in matching their heritage, but it can also make sense for any site that is used by a group (for example a group publishing platform).

It’s a clever mechanic, and it will be interesting to see whether it works for MyHeritage and whether other social sites implement something similar.”

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/myheritage-social-payments-2011-7#ixzz1RyYprp7U

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Researching family in Jersey, part 7: Property Records and PRIDE

A Jersey Property Deed by Nick Thorne
A Jersey Property Deed

Establishing who owns land or a house on it is important, and pretty well every country has a land registry. Jersey’s is small but perfectly formed because every property transaction goes before one single body, the Royal Court. Apart from a small number of mid-17th century transactions, records are complete back to 1602. The first 150 years of records are on paper, but everything subsequent to about 1800 has been scanned and indexed into a computer system called PRIDE. There are two terminals at the Archive. One is upstairs in the reading room, the other is downstairs in reception – which is exceedingly useful as it can be used between 1pm and 2pm when the reading room is shut. You will need a member of staff to log you on.

PRIDE has a very simple search interface, and for most purposes you need a name to investigate, but it can be a hugely useful tool. Not only do you find sales of property, but after 1841 you will also find wills and details of partages – arrangements which exist to deal with the complexities of Jersey’s Norman-based system of inheritance.

You will also find details of rentes. Rentes are a little like a mortgage – you agree to long-term instalment payments in return for a capital sum – but unlike modern mortgages they are theoretically perpetual, and they can be inherited or traded between individuals, although there are very few left today. Also on PRIDE you will find details of procurations – in other words, appointments of attorneys to act on behalf of an individual – for more recent times.

If you start in modern times – after about 1980 – you can search properties. Any sale contract has to include a recital of title – in other words, who the seller acquired the property from and when. If you are fortunate it is then possible to work back up the chain…

Even if you don’t understand all of the legal niceties, PRIDE can still be hugely informative. A search for Philippe Du Feu threw up a document dated 1826. It didn’t actually concern Philippe so much as his wife Elizabeth Amy: the Amy family had created what we call a partage des heritages to ensure that the five daughters were provided with money for homes by their brother who had inherited the estate. In doing so the document gives us the names of all of Elizabeth Amy’s siblings, the names of their husbands (if they were married at that point), her parents, her brother’s grandparents and several aunts and cousins. None of that detail is on the Du Feu family tree. And study of the contract itself could give a great deal more information to the family historian – how generous the settlement was (or wasn’t) could indicate the social standing of the family.

Next time we’ll be looking at military records. Until then – À bétôt!

Guest blog by James McLaren from the Channel Islands Family History Society

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Your Family Tree Magazine is a favourite of mine

Disclosure: Compensated Affiliate.
Your Family Tree is considered, by many family historians, to be one of the most respected genealogy magazines around. I love the way that they not only feature articles on the various traditional means of researching our family trees but also give advice on using personal computers or Apple Macs to do ancestor research. Their aim is “to make tracing family history accessible and rewarding for everyone” according to their website. Your Family Tree offers practical advice, written by experts, on all areas of family history research and is known as Your Family History outside of the UK. The content, however, is the same in both magazines so don’t feel you will lose out if you are based abroad. The Editor, Russell James, is quoted as saying this: “Each issue covers an array of old documents, answers readers questions, and puts family historians in touch with one another. You’ll also receive a covermounted CD-ROM for Mac and PC containing an array of genealogy resources, as well as a pull-out region research card (contacts, map, plus key local resources and historical facts) and four collectable surname index cards every issue.” I personally can’t wait each month for my copy to arrive. I used to buy it from the newsstand until I realised the convienince and the special price that is offered when taking out a subscription. Take a look at whats on offer by clicking one of the banners on this page and you will be able to try before you buy by looking inside a magazine. Recently I’ve enjoyed reading articles such as these below. Want to join me? 100 vital websites – Bumper online special How To guides including: Research Scottish clans, find old maps online, date wedding photos and organise your records Pass down your family’s story – Make sure your findings are never forgotten Migration records – Discover the best websites to help you trace your ancestors’ movement Royal Mail workers – The stories of your postal ancestors Now I know this looks like I am simply acting as a salesman for them; but I really do read this magazine and I have personally got a lot out of my subscription and so I do not apologise for recommending them! A good genealogist never stops learning. We are all somewhere between Beginner and Advanced Beginner! Disclosure: Compensated Affiliate.

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