Re: Why do British records cost money when other countries are free?


"FarmI" <ask@itshall be given> wrote in message
news:48e1c0f3$0$22589$5a62ac22@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
"Don Moody" <dpmoody@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

then abandon genealogy in case you come up with some Smiths from
England, Williams from Wales

Hah! I knew I'd somehow managed descend from the wrong lot of
ancestors! One line ends in (so far) brick wall of a John Smith in
Exeter and another line ends in Williams in Glamorgan.


I don't, as far as I know have any Smith but I have an aunt and a
ma-in-law who were born Williams, but no known relationship. I took
one look at each line, and promptly chickened out. Trying to sort out
Bain in Scotland was already enough of a nightmare. It might have been
a bit easier if they'd stuck to Scotland but they spread all over the
world and indulged in such sports as changing their name to fit the
local languages. The sort of thing where a Bain got on a boat and a
Whitehead got off it. Maddening. They managed to combine that sort of
flexibility with a rigid and very limited choice of forename. I
managed to track one Andrew Bain down to a small cemetery in Argyll -
I thought. In that one cemetery there are 17 Andrew Bain buried. Sort
that lot.

So I have sympathy with the problem as stated by the OP because I've
been there. That's also why I have no sympathy with his approach of
wanting instant, free, access on line. When ancestors combine
flexibility and rigidity in naming one is in for a long and complex
search which will involve information which isn't on line . Those who
don't enjoy the searching are best advised not to bother with the end
result. Even if they got an end result which satisfied them, they are
likely to find that satisfaction vanish when some uncertainty appears
and they have to start searching again. This time in the knowledge
that prior effort led them in the wrong direction.

It's not everybody who enjoys a process illustrated in extreme by drug
research. For decades everybody in that game accepted as a fact of
life that given a correlation between a chemical structure and a
biological activity it would take an average of 3000 tries with
slightly different structures to get one product on a pharmacy shelf.
In other words we accepted that 2999 tries going wrong was a sensible
price to pay for one going right. We not only accepted it but enjoyed
it, because all those wrong tries were themselves occasions of
learning more about the field in which we worked. Half a dozen blind
alleys and brick walls in genealogy is small beer on the drug research
scale. But it is more than enough to sort out those who find
fascination in the search process from those who can think only of
'the bottom line' - a result. The results folk should abandon
searching because it will only make them unhappy. They should be happy
with the result of ancestral activity which they already have.
Themselves and their lives.

Don


.

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