| PLEASE READ:
I am not warning you against purchasing these CDs or subscribing to
these services. I bought Broderbund's
Census Bundle of eleven
CDs and Marriage Bundle of twelve CDs, and I subscribe to Ancestry.com,
Genealogy.com, and GenealogyLibrary.com. I would unhesitatingly purchase
these CDs again, and I have no plans to discontinue my subscriptions to
the mentioned online databases. However...
As a novice genealogist, I naively expected that the census CDs were
complete for the years covered. Now, as an experienced genealogist,
I can see how naive that expectation was. There simply is no complete
index to the US censuses, and Broderbund means it when they labeled
the CDs as covering "Selected Counties." And even as a novice
genealogist, I knew enough not to expect the data to be error free.
What I did not remotely expect, even as an experienced genealogist, was
fundamental
and massive flaws in the databases, ones that wasted untold hours
of my time and caused me enormous frustration until I uncovered them —
not to mention the worst effect, that bad data produce bad genealogy for
everyone using these databases.
| The lapse of integrity that allowed these databases to
be published in this state I do not accept and I do not excuse, especially
as most of these flaws were correctable — some of them easily — prior to
publication. |
I hope I can save you the wasted time and frustration you would otherwise
experience by passing on to you what I've learned about these data.
With knowledge of these deficiencies, you can make good use of these CDs
and services; and, until the day when there is an entire every-name census
index and digitized images of all the census pages online (for free), I
can still recommend the Broderbund Census Bundle and subscriptions
to the censuses at Genealogy.com and Ancestry.com. Simply use them
with caution and, when you have an anomaly, investigate further! |
