Thursday 15 September 2016

FindmyPast's Knowledge Base

FindmyPast's UK website, at www.findmypast.co.uk, is little different these days to its overseas counterparts in terms of offerings, look and feel, with only the subscriptions packages themselves really differing from country to country.

It offers various help resources and videos to help folk get started, but in the past, when FindmyPast was solely a UK based website, it offered a useful help resource for those carrying out English and Welsh research (and some limited assistance for those based elsewhere in the UK), called the Knowledge Base. This includes a vast amount of useful information on everything from English and Welsh registration districts to information about British based overseas records collections, for the army, consular service and more.

Whilst much of this information is not on the current FindmyPast platform, it can be still retrieved easily on the Internet Archive (www.archive.org) - for example, if you visit https://web.archive.org/web/20120830154313/http://www.findmypast.co.uk/help-and-advice/knowledge-base/births-marriages-deaths/index you can see the various topics listed in the bottom left hand corner of the screen - click on each link to view the relevant content (some pages have links to online hosted PDF files of use also; those links I have tested so far are still valid).

NB: Many old websites can be similarly retrieved from the Internet Archive - simply type in the website address of interest in its Wayback Machine, and if a copy of the site has been cached in the past, it should still be available.

Chris

For details on my genealogy guide books, including A Beginner's Guide to British and Irish Genealogy, A Decade of Irish Centenaries: Researching Ireland 1912-1923Discover Scottish Church Records (2nd edition), Discover Irish Land Records and Down and Out in Scotland: Researching Ancestral Crisis, please visit http://britishgenes.blogspot.co.uk/p/my-books.html.

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