Grade: B
Great resources, but some improvements would make for a better user experience and a more useful genealogical resource.
Pros:
- Nice interface. The scanned images are really clear and the site is fast.
- Varied selection. I like that it includes newspapers and documents that you can't find anywhere else. Seems like they add new stuff at least once a month.
- Relatively low cost. Take advantage of the 9.95 introductory month and then cancel if you aren't finding a lot of stuff.
- You can save the documents you find to your computer.
Cons:
- It's not free.
- There's no social aspect. I would love to take the features of Footnote.com and integrate them here. There's no annotating or correcting or connecting to others who found your document interesting.
- No soundex searching. Huh? It's a genealogy site without soundex, go figure...
- Search is based on optical character recognition (OCR), so you might miss some items and catch some items unrelated.
- Search is limited. You can't search for the exact name. If you put in a first and last name it really does a "near" search instead of an exact search.
- You can only save documents page by page. If I find a 50 page biography of my ancestor, I have to download each page individually, then re-combine the PDF's into a file with Adobe Acrobat 7.0.
- You can't save to the site. The weirdest thing about this site is that you can't save anything under your profile. You can't save searches, you can't save links to documents...nothing. So, once you find what you want, there's no need to come back to the site unless they add a collection you think you might be interested in. Ancestry keeps you coming back by letting you save and build a "self" on their site.
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2 comments:
I joined genealogybank.com after seeing an ad on facebook and googling it to find any reviews...I joined and searched for a few relatives whom I have already found certain items for, with much ease I might add, on ancestry.com. Every search for every relative came up empty handed (short of the SSDI which is free elsewhere to search). This website might be useful for some, but definitely not for all...I am can
celling my 1yr membership before the 7 day trial period is even up.
I joined genealogybank.com after seeing an ad on findagrave.com. At first I was unsuccessful, I called into cancel and talked to a site specialist and they walked me through doing searches and sent me out a free chapter on how to search on their site. Since then, I've found so much information and they have an ask the genealogist feature. He gives you advice if you hit a brick wall! It's wonderful! Some people have more luck than others, but once you learn how to search correctly, you find so much! I highly recommend it! I have the 2 year subscription right now.
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