How do you compare the holdings of the online genealogy database programs?

 

How do you compare apples and oranges? The answer to this question is much easier than comparing any two of the large online genealogy/family tree programs. Let me start with Ancestry.com as an example. 

Back on May 12, 2012, I wrote a blog post entitled "10,000,000,000 Records?" Here is a quote from that blog post.

First, I need to talk about collections. By latest count, Ancestry.com has 30,671 collections that are listed in their World Edition. In contrast, for example, FamilySearch.org, as of 12 May 2012, has 1146 collections. However, as I have written before in this blog, the designation "collection" when referring to genealogical records has no commonly understood meaning.

On FamilySearch.org, a collection can be anything from a little over 1000 records in the Arizona, Civil War Service Records of Confederate Soldiers, 1861-1865 to over 90 million records in the United States Social Security Death Index. The same thing holds true on Ancestry.com. If they are counting their Public Member Trees, then there are 2,107,016,069 records listed in that collection alone and way down at the end of Ancestry.com's list is the tiny "The Stone Family Association, 1910" with one record.

Hmm. How does that compare to figures from 2022? Quick math (even within my capabilities) says that it was ten years ago. Looking at Ancestry.com on the date of this post, I see that the card catalog has listed 33,141 collections. That is an increase (my math again) of 2,470 collections in the last ten years. The largest Ancestry collection in the card catalog is still Public Member Trees with 1,895,402,199 which is a drop of 211,613,870 trees. Hmm, again. Also, about 26,000 of those "collections" have less than 1,000 records. Also, about 23,000 of those collections have less than 500 records and I could just keep going until I got to those with less than 10 records which occurs in about 1,166 collections. I guess my conclusion is the same as it was 10 years ago, the number of collections is meaningless. 

What about FamilySearch? Oh, they had 1146 collections in 2012. As of the date of this post, FamilySearch lists 3,089 collections but that is only in the Historical Record Collections of indexed records. There is no count available for those collections in the Catalog or Images. Again, the numbers are mostly meaningless. 

My measure is simple. If you find the record you are looking for, then the website is very useful. If you don't find the record you are looking for, the website is less useful. Negative results do have some value. 

Each of the large genealogy websites has its own unique records. We are presently in a much better place than we were ten years ago,. but I would still not put much confidence in any attempt at comparing the different collections based on claimed numbers of records, images, collections, or any other measure.