In a message dated 12/19/2002 10:41:58 AM Central Standard Time, ncgen@mindspring.com writes: > In response to Emma's post about the census images being made > available through the Tex-Share co-op and Heritage Quest: Has anyone > compared these with the census images on Ancestry.com? I have an > Ancestry subscription, but find that searching the census records is > very frustrating. The indexes are often faulty, and the images are > slow to load and manipulate. I would happily spring for a better > alternative! > > > Hi Elizabeth, I subscribe to Ancestry and now have access to Heritage through the college. Have been working with Heritage now for about 5 weeks now. And there are some real interesting differences. 1. The software is different thus what you have to do to manipulate the images themselves differs. Since I was used to Ancestry it took just a bit of time to readjust to Heritage. But... once I made that adjustment I like it just as well or better. 2. I think the Heritage images load just a little bit faster than the Ancestry images do. All I have is a modum. Nothing fancy. 3. The Heritage images load from top to bottom while the Ancestry images load left to right. What this means is that if the person you are looking for is near the top of the page you can see that person's entire entry at the same time rather than having to wait for the right hand side of the page to finish loading. Hope that makes some sort of sense. 4. Just based on the searching I have done so far I think Heritage Quest has done a better job with their indexes in terms of accuracy. But... Ancestry provides a few more options for wildcard searching that Heritage does. At the same time I like the way Heritage presents the results of any search. It is easier to locate a specific person. It is also easier to enter say only a surname and then look at the first names to decide which ones you want to check. 5. Neither Heritage or Ancestry has all the census indexed. Ancestry has 1920 and working on 1930. Heritage has the 1910 and 1890 and 1870 census indexed. The both have 1790, and 1800 and a couple of others. Actually Ancestry says they have all the census up to and including 1850 indexed but as you know the indexes are not good at all and the index results are not all linked to the images so you still end up hunting. In Heritage, everything in their index is actually linked to the images. I have found myself actually using and benefiting from both. Right now because of the lack of indexes and the poor indexes I am working back and forth between the two systems and it has helped to have both. I don't know if I have confused the issue or helped..... <g> Take care - Emma