New FamilySearch: what you gain on the swings you lose on the roundabouts. I like new and improved versions of software and search engines, but with this one for every gain there is a corresponding loss -- is it worth it? Review here: http://su.pr/ADGVVj -- Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa Web: http://hayesfam.bravehost.com/stevesig.htm Blog: http://methodius.blogspot.com E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk

I help with a monthly family history workshop. Yesterday one of the participants with no home access to the net had his first encounter with nFS. He found a marriage which he'd been looking for for some years - it's on the new marriage database but no other. Advantage nFS? Sort of but unfortunately it gives him the town but not the parish & there were two CofE ancient parishes in the town. Having got the bride's name we could find her birth & baptism on both old and new site. Dead heat? Not really because again nFS doesn't give the church which oFS does. And clicking on the oFS batch number & searching that batch with the father's name brings up a bunch of siblings. nFS could, no doubt have also found them by searching on location and surname followed by a manual trawl through the hits. Both sites have the bride's parents marriage and both give the parish so that is a dead heat. In this example the new site scores by having the bigger database and the old by having more information on churches and better searching. But what would be the easier route to bringing them both into parity - adding the extra data to the old site or adding the extra access paths and retrieved detail to the new site? It's possible that pilot search would combine the best of the two sites but ATM it's not responding. -- Ian The Hotmail address is my spam-bin. Real mail address is iang at austonley org uk