Links for Jewish research

Carla the familysearch link takes you to the front page, do you know where on the site the London Jewish records are and we can update the post to link to there.

 

The old site had dramatically fewer records on it, they were confused and badly indexed, the worst of it was the mixing of guesswork records (the submitted by member) and the actual transcribed index records from the original parish records. This meant that unless you were extremely careful you ended up relying on someone else's mistakes and guessing.

The new site whilst it takes a whole lot more effort to get used to is dramatically better in its search capabilities. Its this familiarity with what we knew that causes most people to have the reaction you have posted. Once you get over the learning curve, and I agree it is probably a needlessly steep learning curve, then you will wonder why you ever liked the old site.

The biggest problem is that the default settings don't limit records by country and so you tend to get a whole lot of "possible" results including stuff in USA that you just aren't interested in. So what seemed a simple search before now feels needlessly complicated. However in the past you were typically filling out a lot more boxes as several fields in the old search were mandatory eg: "region" and "country" were mandatory. If I had a pound for every time I set British Isles, Scotland in the old family search I'd be rich. For the new search because country isn't a mandatory field you end up with results you aren't interested in and so you get lost and disheartened and yearn for the "simplicity" of the old site.

However once you realise some of the basics and perhaps bookmark a couple of shortcuts to the collections that interest you most then you will find the new site a whole lot more productive.