Dear Users of the Online Genealogical Index,
Today is a big day as the new OGI was released last night! Completely rewritten thanks to a skilled FamilySearch colleague of mine in Finland, Pablo. We are still refining the new site and things will settle down even more in the next few days.
Pablo and I hope you enjoy the new look and feel, the speed of searching and the ability to filter the type of results you need. The year range is more intelligent and will offer results that include all or a part of the search range as well as any collection that has no years (such as a cemetery).
Please feel free to reach out and suggest any changes or leave your comments here in the blog. I am reachable anytime at contact@ogindex.org.
Today's update was a generous 1,879 data sets bringing the site total to 407,640. This included the reupload of changed collections where year ranges have been expanded such as in Findmypast's Leicestershire collections. Not included in this total are hundreds of changes to FreeReg year ranges.
Here are the details of today's upload.
- Archive.org, Somerset - 15 image sets
- Archive.org, Derbyshire War Memorials - 2 locations
- Findmypast, Leicestershire Banns - 281 parishes
- Findmypast, Leicestershire Baptisms - 307 parishes
- Findmypast, Leicestershire Burials - 287 parishes
- Findmypast, Leicestershire Marriages - 306 parishes
- Findmypast, Staffordshire Parish Registers - 7 parishes
- Findmypast, Yorkshire Monumental Inscriptions - 306 cemeteries
- FreeReg - 277 Parish Register sets (Dorset, Devon, Derbyshire, Berkshire)
- Gravestone Photos - 5 new cemeteries
- OPCDorset - 5 new data sets
- Surrey, Epsom and Ewell Records - 54 data set collections
- TINSTAAFL Marriages - 18 new parishes
- TINSTAAFL Norfolk Baptisms - 3 new parishes
I still am very impressed with the hidden genealogical treasures available on archive.org's amazing digital book collections. After manually reviewing over 214,000 pages and adding over 3,900 links to parish registers, memorial inscription lists, family pedigrees and other vital record information to the database, it has been worth every page! It may have deteriorated my vision but I would do it all again. There are hundreds of thousands more pages to review but a lot of the information I have found is unique to this resource. The only graveyard survey available anywhere, etc. And I do trust a survey recorded in the 1800s as it includes many headstones that have since crumbled or been removed. Here is an example for St Weburgh, Bristol printed in 1890. It includes 39 headstone transcriptions.
It is very satisfying finding such items in these old books and adding them to the database for all to find once more. And archive.org is completely free!
I hope going forward, the changes and new data will be a joy to use and bring more success in your research. Thank you for your encouragement and for the kind donations that have helped cover the costs of keeping the site up and running.
Until next time,
Tim Manners
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