Genealogy Supplies

I saw a google ad:-

The UK's largest supplier of family history software, data and books
so I had to click on it out of curiosity and ended here -

S&N Genealogy Supplies - Software, UK Census and Data CDs
as an existing customer I just received by post their handsome PRODUCT CATALOGUE 2007 and had been planning to blog the firm.

"We care about the quality of our online and CD census indexes as much as you do, which is why we are the only company to use a team of UK employees and volunteers to create, check and amend the data. We also licence data from UK individuals and societies.

"Why not join us? - and get rewards

We have set up a new site: www.UKindexer.co.uk with a set of bespoke tools that we have developed for our volunteers to use.

www.UKindexer.co.uk is already proving popular and people are enjoying using the new tools.

"If you are interested in being involved, why not join us? We offer online subscriptions and other rewards to those who help us. For details of the indexing project, go to www.UKindexer.co.uk and sign up.

Read reviews of the UK Indexer at http://www.genealogyreviews.co.uk/onlinesubs.htm

Genealogy Reviews - Family Tree Magazine: "Although they started out with a volunteer surname indexing project, the census pieces are now fully transcribed in India with good results. The transcription stage is followed by an initial check to sample the data, which is then rejected if the error rate is unacceptable.

"The data is then examined by a series of sophisticated, custom written software programs which look for anomalies. Initially these look at names and their frequency, flagging unusual looking entries. The flagged entries are checked and corrected by the S&N Genealogy Supplies trained in-house indexing team and the end result is used to create the name indexes. These are released in advance of the full transcripts, which still have a considerable amount of work to be done.

Further customised software examines the fully transcribed data, which contains all the major fields including the occupation. This software looks at details such as place names, relationships and occupations, again flagging any entries that look dubious. These are then checked by their in-house team assisted by over 4,000 volunteer indexers who have signed up to help at www.ukindexer.co.uk."

Well a slight contradiction there, and all online reviews are suspect, often being written by the owner of the hotel or pub concerned

If the new transcriptions are fully text searchable they will rival the older 1881 and 1901 census with findable addresses and occupations.