lol 1939 Register - if you know enough...

[Janet]

Originally Posted by Merry

I think they see me as a problem creator, not a problem solver!

They obviously don't hang out here, then.

[Merry]

Aaaahhh thank you Janet

[Merry]

They have sent me what is probably a standard email which includes this:

At this stage, I am unable to say how long it is likely to be before we receive a positive response from our technical team, but please be assured that they are working through all the queries they have as quickly as possible.

[Merry]

I have just received an email telling me they have passed the problem about page 1616a 006 etc to their Technical Team for investigation.

lol But didn't they do that in November??

[Kit]

oh dear.

or they are finally telling you about it.

[Merry]

They've told me several times since Nov that the Technical Dept are 'looking into it". Maybe they think I have medium term memory loss??

[Merry]

It seems odd to me that records are open for people where fmp have been unable to transcribe the year of birth. Surely if the year field has not been transcribed you would expect the entry would be closed as they won't know the age of the individual?

(Page 1616A 006 is still unchanged. Now 127 days since I reported it)

[Merry]

I just looked at page 1616a 006 and they have added an extra 17 entries to it. When I view these 'new' entries they are from the page after the one with my family on it (all still indexed with the wrong names). I wonder what they will do next?

[Merry]

Oh, the new people also have the wrong names in their transcriptions! lol

Some of them appear correctly elsewhere (1616J 007?).

[James18]

Well, having now seen multiple 1939 records thanks to a relative with an annual FMP sub, all I can say is that I cannot help but feel the majority of people who paid £7 a pop (I think it was?) to unlock households have been well and truly done over. The information is poor, the quality is atrocious and the price for what you're paying for is, frankly, obscene. I realize that the Register is now available to anyone who already has an annual sub, and that's great, but I can see why they had to do that eventually - presumably relatively few people paid to unlock per household.

The theory behind allowing public access to the Register is great, but most of the records I've seen have been of a far inferior quality to the 1911 census, and to the extent that several of them are utterly illegible. There are random bits of sticky tape covering records that aren't even redacted, and when officially redacted records are covered up (with weird, bendy black lines) the effect is that neighbouring open records are either partially or completely obscured by the distortion. Maybe I'm just unlucky with the records I've seen, but it's so bad that many transcriptions are genuinely just pure guesses, and several just have dashes because the transcriber hasn't even been able to guess.

What annoys me most is that FMP promised 'full names and dates of birth' as being information provided, and yet with a handful of exceptions, everyone I've seen has either simply used a first name or a first name and middle initials. I already had those from different (free) sources, and the main reason I wanted to view households on the Register was to obtain full names for several people without having to order birth certificates.

I honestly hope some of you have been able to overcome brick walls in your research by finding unexpected relatives living together and so on, but my personal experience has simply been one of utter disappointing, and that it isn't half as useful as FMP hyped it up to be. It certainly doesn't help that a lot of people's records are either wrongly closed or simply missing altogether.