Sunday Times article about new research service

[KiteRunner]

Has anybody else read it? Title is "Roll Up for the Magical Ancestry Tour" in yesterday's edition (22nd June), page 18. If you have online Times access it will be available on there.

What do you think of it? I can't believe the price (bear in mind that the example in the article is only a mini-version of what he would have got for the full price, though).

[Merry Monty Montgomery]

Wha's the price Kite?

[KiteRunner]

Make sure to have a mouthful of coffee or something ready to spit out....


25,000 pounds!

[Merry Monty Montgomery]

Make sure to have a mouthful of coffee or something ready to spit out....


25,000 pounds!

lolol!! I'll take three!

[Olde Crone Holden]

WHAAAAATTTT???

What do you get for that....death masks of all your ancestors since Adam and Eve I should hope.

*retires, stunned*

OC

[Little Nell]

Link to article

Roll up for the magical ancestry tour - Times Online

It's a non-celebrity version of "Who do you think you are?" where they trace your family tree and take you to your ancestral roots, where you stay in a posh country hotel.

[Phoenix]

Blinkety flip, if people can enjoy cyber champagne, four posters and a resident ghost, we could do the research and throw in some POWs as well, then they wouldn't have to leave the comfort of their armchairs1

[Olde Crone Holden]

LOL - I wonder just what posh country hotel is on the Lancashire Moors.

Or, perhaps they only go back to the 1800s, in which case I will be billetted in B and B in a terraced house in Manchester.

No, think I'll save my £25,000 to spend on certs and wills, thanks.

OC

[Little Nell]

Most of the fun of family research is doing it yourself, not being presented with it by someone else.

Though I would like the luxury of being driven around various ancestral villages in a limo!

[samesizedfeet]

My guide, Sue Hills, had spent the previous few weeks researching my family tree.


That's go to be pretty thorough then!!!

[Mary from Italy]

I wonder what we've all spent on doing our trees, if you add an hourly charge for the time spent researching the tree to the cost of the certs?

If you spend an average of 2 hours a day for 2 years and charge £10 an hour, it comes to £7,300. If you buy, say 100 English certs, that brings it up to £8,000.

[Merry Monty Montgomery]

I dread to think........... and whatever figure I dream up would be quadrupled by OC (mainly because she is older than me, of course!!)

[Olde Crone Holden]

Hmmmm. *ignores Merry*

I suppose it's a bit like building a house - you either take forty years to do it yourself (in my case), getting a lot of stuff free and weighing up every ha'penny before you spend it, or you go out and buy a house that someone else built, and pay them for it.

However, the woman who has worked "for a few weeks" on someone's tree hasn't spent £25,000 worth of time.

One day I will sit down and work out exactly what my certs have cost me. Many were bought when they were only £3, and some of the marriages are photocopies from church registers which cost 10p! Half my tree is Scottish and those certs only cost £1.20.

Of course, I'm not adding in the time. You don't charge yourself for something you LOVE doing!

OC

[Lin Fisher]

I was thinking on the same lines as you OC. It's a hobby that we all like doing and have something to show for our money.

When you think of Golf, football marches, boozing etc. Nothing to show the next day for the money that has been sent.

Lin

[Little Nell]

Plus there's all the overheads, travel to records offices, photocopying, notebooks, pencils, acid-free pockets, files, computer software, books, etc. etc.

[Sue at the seaside]

I recently set about "doing" a tree for a friend, I really started from his paternal grandfather, (everyone else was still alive, and it didn't seem right to do them as well) I worked on it over a month, managed to get quite a lot done in the first week, (without any certificates!!!) but then there was the waiting game for the cert to arrive. I then had to explore what to do about Scotish ancestors. In total it cost me £19. (plus my sub to ancestry uk) I managed 5 generations on all lines, some were far more interesting and got a bit further back, As I said 4 weeks......I didn't take him anywhere nice to tell him about it, just presented him with a big looseleaf file of info and 2 large printed trees! which my husband printed for me. I think there could be some money to be made here!!!!

[Sue at the seaside]

Just been thinking about this......It would be a dead loss for me to have this done, can you imagine spending the time in a luxury hotel in Spitalfields and Bethnal Green in East London, ALL of my significant ancestors are from there! We could do a Jack the Ripper walk I suppose.

At least my husband would get to go to Kent, Darling buds of may area, that's a bit more appealing.

[Vicky the Viking]

hmmmm, I sense a money-grabbing opportunist here. Still, there is always someone prepared to pay that sort of money, whereas most of us (I suspect) would baulk at the idea of paying someone even £50 for something we know can be done in an hour, if you know where to go & what to look for. This sort of knowledge only comes with years of experience & you pay for that in every field if you can't or don't want to do it yourself. (Not that I'm justifying what I consider an extortionate amount of money for this particular company to charge).

I would like to know precisely when & why "my" distant ancestor was knighted but I'm afraid I am not prepared to pay the Royal College of Heralds silly money to tell me.

I would like a guided tour of all my ancestal haunts - including a trip to the Punjab where my gt grandfather was in the army for some years - but I can arrange it myself for a fraction of the price. £25K could get me a world cruise.

As Sue, I also managed to get all of my tree back to 1837 within a couple of weeks of starting out; getting all the relevant certificates (starting with my grandparents marriages & births) & including a free trial of Ancestry. I am pleased to say during this time I only got one incorrect certificate (which turned out to be an illegitimate son of my gt gt grandfather's sister)
But then I was lucky in that my ancestors were all boring, law-abiding citizens so it was relatively straightforward.

The "meat" came later, with hours of googling & reading all sorts of stuff, some of which was relevant & some wasn't. (I discovered the "WILF" syndrome & ended up spending all day every day on the net for weeks on end.) I only recently found out that a brother of my 8xgt grandfather was a renowned persecutor of Quakers. Makes me wonder all the more what sort of personality his brother had. And no amount of money can tell me that.

[Merry Monty Montgomery]

I only recently found out that a brother of my 8xgt grandfather was a renowned persecutor of Quakers.

I hope that wasn't any of my Quakers?!! lol

[Vicky the Viking]

I do hope so too Merry.

Mostly around the Reading area, if I remember rightly. Time period would be mid to late 17th century I think. He was involved in the English Civil War (but I don't know if he was knighted before that or because of it)

I found the info on google books but didn't save it, I'll have another look.

He was also mentioned on a couple of websites too. As well as a particular couple of families he had thrown into jail, he seemed obsessed by Quakers in general.