Wednesday 24 July 2013

Improved coverage of Sussex on FamilySearch



FamilySearch have improved their coverage of Sussex parish registers with the addition of over 400,000 baptism, marriage and burial records taken from parish registers.  These are index entries only with no access to the original image.

A list of the parishes covered can be found here and it looks as if more will be added at some time in the future (but no indication when).

I did a quick comparison with the Sussex Family History Group (SFHG) database with a search for my own surname and, although results cannot be directly compared because of the differences and idiosyncrasies between the databases, I found only 78 results on the FamilySearch database (48 if limited to exact spelling) but got results in 121 categories on the SFHG database which includes 125 events in Horsham alone (94 if limited to exact spelling).  If you are a member of the SFHG you will get much better results from their database but you may find the FamilySearch database a much friendlier interface.

I searched the FamilySearch Sussex database for several known events (within the parishes and time periods listed as covered) without finding them - expanding the search to All Collections found the baptisms as part of other databases but there was no sign of the burial records.  It suggests that the Sussex database on FamilySearch does not have complete coverage of events within the parishes & periods they claim.  Hopefully this will improve soon.


No comments:

Post a Comment