Which site is best....

Peter's usual advise is solid, find out what your local library, family history society etc has a subscription for and get the other one. For US records I find that Ancestry is better. Findmypast is a relative latecomer but they benefit from learning from the mistakes of others and so tends to be a more rounded experience. One thing you can do with Findmypast is to use their pay per view searches to check if the site has the sorts of records you are interested in.

I maintain my Ancestry sub mainly because I use Family Tree Maker and benefit from the synchronising of tree with online resources. Their integrated search facility that scans your tree and searches their databases for possible matches is incredibly useful. You do still have to follow usual rules of research and check what you find to make sure it is actually a match, but it can give a whole lot of leads. My findmypast subscription I pickup from time to time, although their Scottish coverage isn't as good, then again nothing much could be as good as Scotland's People the website of the Scottish Archives. If only Scotland's People had a subscription service, rather than pay per view, I'd subscribe in a flash even if it was £200 a year (doing a one name study can eat up a lot of credits).

The interesting thing is that it is BrightSolid that run both FindmyPast and Scotland's People so maybe one day. Although I believe the stumbling block is that the rules governing the payment regime were setup by the Scottish Government as its a Scottish Government website. I would be interested in trying to get the MSPs to amend the legislation to allow a subscription service to be introduced but to do the would require proving demand.

 

We can get subscriptions at Scotland's People if we can get an MSP who is interested to propose a change to the regulations that govern the site. A recent change was made for example to change the length of time credits were valid for it used to be just 30 days before the expired (you never lost them but the expiry was a pain) now it's 180 days. I used to have a few links to MSP friends but they lost their seats at last election. I do have the wife of one of them as a cousin although she is fairly distant 4th cousin so that might be a route to get interest.

The problem is what is the best way to demonstrate there is a demand for a subscription service, and that a subscription service would not damage the revenues they already get.

 

FTM 2012 has some major upgrades on 2011, its been out for almost two years now and has had some major improvements even since its launch. With 2012 when you start it up it checks for any new versions and asks if you want to go ahead and install them for free. As I understand it they aren't doing a 2013 version as they find it easier to just upgrade the existing product. Which is great as it means you get upgrades to everything after FTM 2012 free of charge so far.

A lot of the changes are to do with having a tree online note that this can be completely private as well as a public tree. The benefit of a private tree is that no data is shared unless you specifically enter the email address of someone you want to share it with. For me this is great for sharing my tree with my mum and my auntie. They can sit on their computers or iPads etc devices and browse the tree seeing all the stuff I've entered. And the best bit is that its auto updated all the time so whenever I find something new they can see it.

You can even give someone update rights so they can add data. I've done this for my DNA project tree, everyone in the Bisset DNA project who is a match can logon to Ancestry and contribute to the tree. This way the whole project benefits from the collaborative efforts of everyone in the project.

Aside from these changes there are huge upgrades to the interface with Ancestry website. It now auto searches the Ancestry site and finds likely data for people in your tree. Like any search its not always 100% but its really extremely easy to use and there is a fantastic merge feature. This means if you find a record online and you are sure its right you can click merge and it runs a wizard to add just the data you want to select to your tree. It sources everything so it makes it very simple to refer back, and it even copies any images (eg: certificates and census records) and links them to the people you select in your tree. If its a census and you find new children it will ask if you want to add the children to that marriage or create a new marriage (if its a second wife for example and some kids are to the first marriage). All extremely easy to do and makes searching and linking in English records a lot less painful. Sadly most of my research is Scottish records so I don't use this feature a lot.

 

I've only just got around to reading this thread

Re the original post - to me which subscription site to subscribe to depends entirely on where your research is. Country is far too broad. As much of my research is in Dorset, I now couldn't survive without Ancestry which has the images of all registers and many other resources from the Dorset History Centre. Another major area for me is London. In 2008 I made it to England briefly and spent almost a week in London staying within walking distance of the LMA and spending almost all my time there. Now those registers and some other things are online - again at Ancestry. Ancestry also have images of PRs for some other areas as well.
However for other areas FMP has far better transcription coverage and the PR images for Cheshire, part of Devon, the Canterbury part of Kent, Westminster, and probably other places.

Re Scotland's People. If it were a subscription site, I'd take out a subscription immediately. My Scots ancestors left before civil registration and before the 1841 census. They have common names. They were also non-conformist in Scotland - Scotch Baptists. Searching for them or using the meager clues I have to their families who may have stayed in Scotland is a fishing expedition that can only be done via subscription or at the Scottish archives where you don't have to pay per view. If there is any way of lobbying the Scottish Parliament to change the conditions to allow subscriptions, that would be great. After an initial try with credits I gave up and can't see myself going back. I am starting to plan a trip to Scotland with my sister-in-law who also does Scottish research and again rarely if ever buys Scotland's People credits as her names are also common and they left early as well though a little later than mine. It would be nice not to have to spend our limited time in Scotland in Record Offices.

 

It wouldn't surprise me to learn that BrightSolid - who run the Scotlandspeople site on behalf of the authorities - have been trying to persuade them to offer a subscription for years, certainly since they took over findmypast and discovered how subscriptions can increase revenue by making the site more attractive. Indeed, it's much the same argument that I was using in my letter to the Home Secretary - see the 8th April newsletter - but in both cases we're up against the problem that civil servants tend to be cautious.

So Alexander's suggestion of approaching the problem via MSPs is an excellent one - there must be thousands of LostCousins members who live in Scotland, and if even a fraction of them approached their MSP it could have a real impact.