Genealogy.com Reviewer's Comments
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Few family history sites have gained the trust of as many genealogists as Genealogy.com, our "TopTenREVIEWS Silver Award" genealogy search website. This service offers a wide range of family and local histories, vital records, military records and much more. Genealogy.com takes advantage of the powerful search engine and database provided by Ancestry.com and has many of the same user-friendly features including the WorldFamilyTree.
This service requires a paid subscription after a 14-day trail period; the subscription is worth every penny to anyone serious about researching their ancestry. Though very similar to our gold award service, Genealogy.com doesn't include UK census records, international partner sites or directories and member lists that can sometimes play an important role in genealogical research.
Genealogy.com is part of the MyFamily.com, Inc. Network.
Genealogy.com Screenshots. Click to Enlarge
Name Database:
Genealogy.com has several types of databases available including:
Genealogy Library is a comprehensive collection of online records that contain birth, marriage and death facts, plus details about children, religious affiliation, land holdings, court proceedings, military service and more. This database currently has over 300 million names, covers the entire U.S. from the 16th to the 20th century and continues to grow monthly.
World Family Tree features hundreds of thousands of family trees that you can view online or download to your desktop.
U.S. Census is a collection from Genealogy.com and includes all the entry images available for every state and every decade from 1790-1930. This collection encompasses all the census data available within this time period (550 million entries spanning 140 years).
International & Passenger is a collection of passenger lists for all of America's major Atlantic ports, plus European, British and Canadian records. They provide the immigrant's name, names of family members, dates of vital events, port and date of arrival and more.
Family & Local Histories provide 7.5 million fully searchable pages and rare genealogical journals, local histories, atlases and primary sources. The 16,000 titles encompass towns and families from all 50 states, Canada and the British Isles from 1700 through present day.
Data on CD-ROM includes marriage and census information, family trees and much, much more—you'll find records on over 300 million names, (The online subscription contains the same information as the CD-ROM sets.)
Books, Videos, & More has Genealogy Publishing Company books—over the years, this publisher has published over 2000 books and CDs with new items added each month. You can search by title, author, surname or keywords to find books in seconds.
You can purchase each of these options individually or there are three different annual subscriptions available from Genealogy.com—each of the annual subscriptions comes with the Family Tree Maker 2006 genealogy software.
Worldwide Focus:
You can search Genealogy.com's databases of information for birth, death and marriage records by country; this is a great feature for people from countries other than the U.S. and for people who have ancestors from foreign countries.
Other Resources:
With an annual subscription, you have access to Genealogy.com's community. You can look at web pages created by other clients, a virtual cemetery, celebrity family trees and message boards. The site also includes links to other popular genealogy sites.
Ease of Use:
We found Genealogy.com a breeze to navigate with a user-friendly menu bar at the top of the screen.
However, there are some improvements the service could make—for example, some of the links on the left navigation bar in the "World Family Tree" screen, took us to a screen with a message that said that this page had been moved and to click the back button. It would be helpful if Genealogy.com could remedy this issue to save time and make the site more straightforward.
Help/Support:
Genealogy.com offers various ways to learn about the service including a FAQs page, a knowledge base section, message boards and an email address so you can contact customer support.
The service also offers FREE online classes, so you can learn from the professionals.
Summary:
Genealogy.com is a comprehensive site and provides the databases, search tools and information on genealogical research to help anyone discover their roots. The Gold subscription is $69.99 a year, comparable to the top package offered by Ancestry.com. Though Ancestry.com's package includes a few more features, we would recommend using the trial periods before making your final decision.
©2008 TopTenREVIEWS, Inc.
