Well, Friday’s new offering from Ancestry was pretty interesting but FindmyPast certainly trumped the UK Engineer Lists in my opinion…. but that might well be because half of my ancestry and several cases we are working on currently are in Devon! The announcement of the Devon Collection – spanning 1538 to 1915 – comprising over four million fully searchable transcripts and scanned colour images of the handwritten parish registers held by the record offices in Barnstaple and Exeter, means that FindmyPast is the best possible place to find Devonshire ancestors online, with Plymouth and West Devon Record Office’s records already available on the site.
Inevitably, I will lose many hours this weekend (and for the foreseeable future) searching for the numerous variant spellings of Sillifant. FindmyPast has had some bad press of late with regard to the new search facility but I have to confess, their 100 in 100 concept (100 data sets and millions of names in 100 days) certainly goes a long way to improving their relationship with their users – well, me and anyone else with Devon ancestry anyway…. Way to go FindmyPast! I still can’t find the baptism of Humphrey Sillifant but that’s not your fault.
The new additions include baptisms, marriages, banns and burials. Say goodbye to your weekend, West Country genies!
