Quote from web page:
We’re giving you a ticket to follow your travelling ancestors all over the world, absolutely FREE! From 29th August to 5th September, you can search and view all our immigration records – without paying a penny!
* To search our immigration records, you’ll need to register for FREE. All immigration records are available to search for free from 11.59 on 29/08/2011 BST until 11.59 on 5/09/2011 BST.
You might want to look at the MyHeritage Family Tree maker software. You can publish your family tree to a website and if there are other people out there with overlapping branches, it finds them and shows them to you. Even if you choose to just use it for free and not cough up the annual membership fee, you can usually find hints to help you continue searching.
For example, if you have a distant relative on your tree, you might only know about him (and even then, not much beyond birth/death date). However, if he married, and a descendant of his wife has already constructed her family tree, you might find the membership price to pay is quite small, and you could then ask that person for further details about your male ancestor.
There's other software out there, of course, and I've not tried them all so perhaps others do it as well, but I quite like the My Heritage software for that reason.
I believe this is a breach of privacy
It really just accesses the births deaths and marriages register.. Everyone has always had access to that this just makes it easier. Also its not supposed to be able to access info of living people but im sure that there would be glitches. Wanna know what a breach of privacy is FACEBOOK! Its amazing how much ive found out about people that I dont know from a lil FB hunting.
How is Facebook a breach of privacy? The only information available on there is information that people choose to share. If people don't want certain things on Facebook, they shouldn't post them.
great.
hah, thought the title said "Immigration, Free Access to Australia for 1 Week"
Would put the HP Touchpad line up to shame.
LOL, first glance got me with that too…I was getting ready to start gettin' the wagons in a circle there for a while! Damn Al Qaeda! :p
I can't work out how to register without havng to pay…
there's a reason its free- very incomplete… unless your kin arrived via tasmania in 1957 or before, the next recent record is via western australia in 1930 or before.
anyone looking for more recent immigration details (like grand parents or parents) wont find anything of interest, and considering major ports of entry were in melbourne and sydney (and not covered at this website), i wouldnt advise anyone to be handing over cash to ancestry.co.uk just yet.
it looks as though it just concentrates on arrivals from england (ie early settlers first fleet and onwards).
plus vote because it could be interesting to some folk, but considering most of the australian population DOESNT have ties to such early settlers, this isnt an ancestry hunting tool for most australians.
I signed up for the whole lot about about a year and a half ago (had to do the whole lot - one side of the family is australian/british, the other part is american/european), and we use the site at least twice a week to look things up. Have found amazing information (such as copies of my grandmothers passport including photos) and all sorts of other things, but the Australian info is somewhat limited. You can get similar information by using the DIGGER discs (normally available at local libraries and family history centres). Not sure about the immigration info - I haven't explicitly looked at it, but certainly nothing has come up when I've been looking at ancestors who should have info available.
I like Ancestry's idea of the online trees with the 'shaking leaves', but I don't use it much because you can't upload an updated tree, you need to create a new tree each time. I don't make my changes on my online tree, I use software to do it (which I presume most/a lot of people do), which makes it a pain to maintain.
Geni.com is a really good, collaborative family tree web site.
You can export and import your family tree to/from Geni in the standard Gedcom format, invite relatives to join and contribute to the tree, and connect other segments of your family tree if you find another relative who has already entered some information.
It's surprisingly quick to build up a tree of several hundred relatives, especially if a few of them get interested in it and start to add their families.
With this being in the cloud you may have privacy concerns, but as far as I can see their privacy statement seems okay and I haven't heard of anyone that's had problems.
If you build a large tree and find you are receiving too many notification emails of anniversaries and birthdays, you can change the settings to suit you.
Highly recommended.
Nice! Started a family tree but then saw how much it cost to follow those 'leaves' I decided to stop watering it. Looks like ill be out with the watering can this week ;)