Genes Reunited question?

Question

HOw do I search South African records if I log in from the UK, and my profile is all UK-based? My family are all from there, and I'd really like to create our family tree, but I am only able to search birth, marriage and death records from England and Wales.

I've tried going to genesreunited.co.ZA (South Africa), but as soon as I login, I'm back in the UK site. Do I have to create a new login on the South African site in order to search their records?

If there's no way round this, can anyone recomend a South African geneology site of good repute?

Answer 1

The best place to start is probably http://www.cyndislist.com/ - her site is free and she lists every genealogy site available - even by country.

Answer 2

To the best of my knowledge, South African records are not online.  To be fair, very few countries records are, for various reasons, mainly the Data Protection Act.  Many countries simply don't understand genealogy as a hobby and deliberately make access to records difficult or impossible.  The field is basically led by America, England & Wales, Scotland and Canada, mostly what you see at Ancestry.  If you have ancestors in places like New Zealand, Australia and Ireland, life is a lot more difficult, and if you are researching elsewhere, it can be almost impossible.  For one thing many places in Europe changed hands many times across the centuries, borders changed, and records are not in English.  

I've always considered Genes Reunited to be the genealogy website of Satan.  One of their boasts used to be "over 40 million names", which frankly, was a load of rubbish.  Countless names were dublicated several times (I myself am in about five seperate trees and thus counted as five people and most of the other names in my tree are in multiple trees as well) and that's not including the jokers who have "Darth Vader" (born Death Star) and "Mickey Mouse" (born Disneyland) in their "trees".  The creators of this site have bigged it up a lot with false promises and advertising.  They have also managed to alienate most of their original membership of people who knew what they were doing, frequented the message boards and helped people out.  It was the members who made the site, not the staff, but once a few trolls got on the boards the whole tone changed, people started getting reported for non-existent infringements of the rules and having their accounts suspended.  Eventually, the people who helped got fed up with GRs attitude towards them.  They wouldn't help get rid of the trolls, but were perfectly happy to penalise the people who were trying to help others and make the site more useful than just a collection of names.  In the end it was just about money and people were reduced to numbers.  A lot of them walked out.  I was one.  I haven't been back since.

I still get the odd email from people claiming a match.  People in Australia convinced that the John Smith I have born in Glasgow is the name John Smith that is in their tree born in Perth.  Sometimes I think these people are just having a laugh.  9 out of 10 mails I get about "hot matches" are complete rubbish and clueless researchers clutching at straws.  Presumably they think from the adverts that everybodies trees are online, and everybody is on it.  Genes Reunited I guess don't do anything to stop that misinformation.  Most of their "records" are user-submitted.  Whatever census information they have is what they've brought in from somewhere else like findmypast or ancestry.  They don't have anything different from anywhere else.  All they have is a bunch of members researching their trees, and most of the good ones left a couple of years back.  My good contacts at GR (and there have been a few) I am in contact with by regular email.  They too without exception have given up on GR.  It's a site that is very useful for beginners, but one that you can outgrow very quickly.  I've not had a decent match now in almost three years.  Completely fished out.

Now I've had my Sunday morning moan, I feel 100% better!!

Back to the point in hand, if you're taking on South African research, then consult cyndislist.  That will tell you what the best sites are.

Answer 3

Like Mental Mickey  has already said as far as Genes reunited goes, I wouldn't waste my time and effort. We have www.ancestry.co.uk for which I have the world deluxe membership, but as of yet they have nothing for South Africa. In the past I have had to do some South African research. I had relatives that went to South Africa a long time ago, but I couldn't find any genealogy sites at the time, I was having a look around I found these for you, and of course Cyndi's list as well that's already got the majority vote, but have a look at these as well.

http://www.afrigeneas.com/forum-africa/i...

http://www.kindredtrails.com/zimbabwe.ht...

I really hope this helps.

Answer 4

I like Ancestry.com  they have a World wide Web