Update on brightsolid's findmypast.com

brightsolid (with lower case letters) is one of the "Big Four" online genealogy companies. In a recent interview with Elaine Collins, Business Development Director, at RootsTech, we discussed the status of the various websites developed by brightsolid.com. In the U.S., the most prominent of these sites is findmypast.com. Here is a list of the findmypast websites:

• findmypast.com - United States
• findmypast.co.uk - United Kingdom
• findmypast.ie - Ireland
• findmypast.com.au - Australia and New Zealand
• ScotlandsPeople

Elaine Collins indicated that quite recently, brightsolid has finished equalizing the data between the different websites. This means that all of the sites have the same data. The difference in the sites is mainly due to the cultural interests of the various countries. This is really good news for the U.S. subscribers to the findmypast.com website, because it means that all of the content of the U.K. site is also available in the U.S.

In the past, I have heard some dissatisfaction among U.S. users of the program due to the pay-as-you-go credit method of obtaining records. Elaine explained that users have the option of paying for a regular subscription to the websites if they wish to avoid the credit system of buying images. That program was developed for users who only wanted a very few images off of the system. By looking on findmypast.com, I see that a one year, World Wide, subscription would cost $199.92.

brightsolid also has several other valuable websites, including The British Newspaper Archive, a site where they are posting digitized copies of the entire British Library's Newspaper Collection, over 40 million pages over the next ten years. There is also the 1911census.co.uk, a database of the 36 million people who were living in England and Wales at the time. The 1901 Census Online is a similar site with the results of that census.

brightsolid has some highly popular genealogy sites in the U.K. including Genes Reunited, a site with 750 million records including census records from 1841-1911 and fully indexed, fully searchable birth, marriage and death records from 1837-2005. Another of the family of websites is Friends Reunited, a 24 million member social networking site.

CensusRecords.com is a U.S. site from brightsolid, containing the entire collection of U.S. Census records from 1790 to 1940.

You can probably see now why brightsolid is considered one of the Big Four genealogy companies. Thanks to Elaine Collins for insight into this major genealogical service provider.