Double check if possible

[Megan Roberts]

For those who use the “big” genealogical sites a note of caution. Those sites often 'purchase' records from 3rd parties but do not (always) get updates, so it might be that if you go to the 3rd party who originally generated the data, you will get a different set of results. By way of example:

When I first started doing my family history I went to the Commonwealth War Graves site looking for information about my great uncle John Henry Gambold who was killed in Gallipoli in World War 1. At first I could not find him, and then discovered that his surname had been incorrectly recorded / transcribed. That has now been corrected, and if you search their site for any occurrences of the surname “Gambold”, (which is relatively rare), then you get 3 hits, which is what I expect: 1 in WW1 and 2 in WW2. However, go to Ancestry and search their data set entitled “UK, Commonwealth War Graves, 1914-1921 and 1939-1947”; in the same way, and the only results given are the 2 in WW”.

Ancestry never update for corrections given to them, and I think that most of us know that these days it is much more difficult to get FMP to amend errors, so I would advice that it is always worth trying to find the original data provider and seeing whether or not they have more complete information, particularly when as is the case with the CWGC, there's no charge.

[SueNSW]

Whilst the importance of checking things at the source is of course vital in many cases - think it should be pointed out in this example that the WW1 Gambold casualty on the Helles Memorial doesn't come up on Ancestry because they have not updated the corrected spelling

The CWGC database covers all the cemeteries/memorials they are responsible for - what Ancestry has is copies of SOME of the original registers containing the original details of casualties that have in recent years been placed on the CWGC database

Ancestry state - There are currently over 2,000 Commission cemeteries in about 150 countries. The registers of the cemeteries represented in this database only account for a small percentage of the total cemeteries in existence; this collection is by no means complete.

CWGC for example list 41 WW1 cemeteries/memorials in Turkey - the vast majority being on the Gallipoli peninsular - Ancestry have registers online for only 10 of them