09 July 2014

Survey Results: Family History Online International Resources

Yesterday I posted the top ten international resources online chosen by more than 400 responses to the survey question During the past three months which of the following INTERNATIONAL online facilities have you used to pursue your family history interests?

The top ten were Ancestry, FamilySearch, email, Google search, blogs, Facebook, Rootsweb, Google books, findmypast and webinars.

The next ten are:
11. Wikipedia: 41% (Alexa ranking 6).
12. FamilySearch Research Wiki: 40% (78,639 articles to help you get started or learn more).

One of the motivators behind this survey was a blog post Genealogy and Wikipedia by James Tanner on his Genealogy's Star blog. James wrote about the FamilySearch Research Wiki " ... there is a marked increase in the number of genealogists familiar with this particular wiki. But that familiarity does not usually extend to Wikipedia." This survey indicates Wikipedia is widely used for genealogy, but so is the FamilySearch Research Wiki, something I didn't know.

13. Cyndislist: 38% (Alexa rank 35,616 and growing having resolved plagiarism problems)
14. Google, newspaper archive: 36% (amazing coverage and free, a pity Google doesn't actively support it and the image quality is so bad in many cases).
15. Mocavo: 33% (Alex rank 32,670, recently acquired by findmypast).
16. Internet Archive: 32% (Alexa rank 193, use it for digitized books, previous versions of websites and more).
17. Family Tree DNA: 32% (Alexa rank 29,508, apparently genetic genealogy still has a way to go in the community).
18. GenWeb: 32% (still going reasonably strong).
19. Dropbox: 32% (Alexa rank 107, store and share files in the cloud).
20. YouTube: 27% (Alexa rank 3, find useful educational content).

Tomorrow I'll finish off the list.


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