This site

[nathan]

I signed up to this website for a month .. Didn't find it much use..When I first went on this site the information I searched for was pixeled out. I joined for a month on paying the pixeled out information was completely irrelevant. Despite the fact that I joined for only a moth they continue to charge me. The crafty #### have a default setting to automatically renew your membership. This site is a complete con there are sites were you can obtain this same information free of charge. No doubt this post will be removed

[TomBen]

Hi Nathan,

I wasn't going to reply to this at first. Why bother? If you wanted help with searching or with the website you would have gone to the Support System instead you chose to come to the British-Genealogy forum. This option is specifically labelled as Genealogy help and I quote:

Need help or more information on a specific subject or puzzle? Ask your question in our busy forums and get like-minded people to help break through your brick walls.

However I have decided to respond in the hope that more people read this and see that if you can't find something ask and we will help!

First off, could you PM me some of your membership details, e-mail address most importantly. I'd be happy to assist you but can't do so from the Brit-Gen forum.

When I first went on this site the information I searched for was pixeled out.

We provide basic information for free to facilitate a free search of our system. Without even registering on our site you can visit and search for a name, get some basic information and see from the data field labels (e.g. Name, Extra Information, Medals, Duty Location and so on) what else we might have directly available for you. The actual information is pixeled out because Full membership is required. It takes time and money to gather information, transcribe it, index it and provide it in this easily searchable form.

I joined for a month on paying the pixeled out information was completely irrelevant.

As mentioned above you can see what the data fields are before purchasing a membership. If they don't relate to a soldier you are looking for then continue searching! J Smith appears in our database numerous times 99% of them are different people!

If you are having trouble identifying the correct soldier ask for help by clicking on the "Help" button and selecting "Get Help from Support". Our staff will gladly do lookups when asked and can suggest alternate roads of research. We have ex-Armed Forces personnel who are very good at helping with new avenues of approach, we've got Military History Graduates, Professional Researchers, Militaria Collectors who are experts at recognising badges and medals all sorts of knowledgeable people just waiting to help out.

Despite the fact that I joined for only a moth they continue to charge me.

We offer several different kinds of membership on the website. Please see HERE for the full details. The only recurring membership we currently offer is labelled clearly as such. All the others are single payments only. This has been in operation since the middle of December.

Prior to that we did have a recurring membership on all membership subscriptions. As the label indicates they were subscriptions and all information pertaining to this was either provided on the payment pages or was included in the Terms and Conditions along with a small tutorial on how to cancel the renewals.

In addition our staff are always willing to turn off renewal settings and provide refunds if you forgot to change the setting or otherwise. Please click on the Help button on the website and select "Get Help From Support".

This site is a complete con there are sites were you can obtain this same information free of charge. No doubt this post will be removed

If Forces War Records were a con it would have been shut down years ago wouldn't it? Yet we've been here for going on 10 years now and are rapidly becoming THE Military Genealogy specialist in the UK thanks to the ability to dig into this niche in ways that Ancestry for example are not interested in.

Some of our information can be found for free elsewhere. For example we have picked up a lot of casualty records from Imperial War Graves Commission Records which are also available under the successor to that organisation the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

BUT we also have record collections which are NOT AVAILABLE ANYWHERE ELSE ONLINE. These range from our current project; "Hospital Admissions and Discharge Registers First World War" through the "Prudential Assurance Roll of Honour" to "Home Guard Officer and Auxiliary Units 1939-1945 lists".

Even when our record sources cross-over with information that is available in the National Archives would you rather pay £6.95 (1 Day Membership) for access to our site or pay the logistics costs associated with getting to Kew Gardens?

Let's assume for example you live in Sheffield.

By Car it is 163 miles (326 mile round trip) to Kew Gardens which is a 3 Hour 46 Minute (7 Hour 32 Minute round trip) journey.

With an average Miles per Gallon of 50 you use 3 gallons (approx. 13 Litres) of petrol/diesel which would cost you roughly £14.00 for petrol (£28.00 Round trip).

£6.95 for membership sounds a lot better and that's not even factoring in the possible cost of a hotel or second trip if you don't complete your search.

My point here is thus; Ask us to help you and we will. If you aren't satisfied with that help you will have our apologies and a refund of any membership payments you may have made.

We are constantly asked challenging Military Genealogy questions particularly when we go to Who Do You Think You Are Live and 99% of the time a customer will be happy because we have helped or have tried to help. I've personally solved road blocks that have included how a Royal Navy man was involved with the German Battleship Tirpitz, turned out he was working on X-Class Midget Submarines. Another solved by my manager was a soldier that didn't appear on any published Roll of Honour from Ancestry or Find My Past and such yet appeared on our site. It turns out one of our exclusive collections as mentioned above is the Prudential Assurance Roll of Honour and he is on there. The customer then related the entire story of him selling insurance policies to his local town!

We work very hard here at Forces War Records and at British-Genealogy. It hurts when someone calls us con artists before even giving us the chance to assist...

Kind Regards,

Tom Bennington BA
Graduate of Military History

[disappointed175]

I agree completely with nathan.
I already subscribe to Ancestry.com and Findmypast and they are very useful sites. I was directed to this website from qaranc.co.uk in the hope of finding hospital records that I might not already have seen (I am happy to go to Kew now and then).
I did a search before I joined, for a month, and found entries for two of the people I was researching. I paid my money only, as nathan states, to find that the information was in one case from the CWGC and in the other the London Gazette; both available free of charge. And they were only listings, they were not the original documents.
On top of that some of the information I have about my injured soldiers is nowhere to be found on this site.
A complete waste of money and thanks for the heads up nathan - I will be cancelling my subscription pretty sharpish.
I don't expect TomBen to reply but it doesn't matter - I won't be using the site again anyway.

[Lesley Robertson]

Well, before you start handing out complaints, etc, it would be useful if you check where you are. British Genealogy is not part of FWR (although we're partnered with them). British Genealogy is free to use - you don't pay a subscription. Equally, we don't hold any records. Everything here is generated by our hard-working volunteers who give up their own time and use their own paid subscriptions to help people who ask questions.

I see that you haven't actually asked us anything, just complained.

Since you seem to have come here from FWR, I suggest that you read this message HERE.

Since TomBen's answer was informative and useful, I'm going to leave this thread, but close it.

[TomBen]

I agree completely with nathan.
I already subscribe to Ancestry.com and Findmypast and they are very useful sites. I was directed to this website from qaranc.co.uk in the hope of finding hospital records that I might not already have seen (I am happy to go to Kew now and then).
I did a search before I joined, for a month, and found entries for two of the people I was researching. I paid my money only, as nathan states, to find that the information was in one case from the CWGC and in the other the London Gazette; both available free of charge. And they were only listings, they were not the original documents.

A complete waste of money and thanks for the heads up nathan - I will be cancelling my subscription pretty sharpish.
I don't expect TomBen to reply but it doesn't matter - I won't be using the site again anyway.

Hi disappointed175,

Thank you for the reply.

I think you missed the main point of my previous post which for reference was "ask for help and we will do our damnedest to sort you out"! But let me answer each of your points as I did before for Nathan who miraculously hasn't responded.

I agree completely with nathan.
I already subscribe to Ancestry.com and Findmypast and they are very useful sites. I was directed to this website from qaranc.co.uk in the hope of finding hospital records that I might not already have seen (I am happy to go to Kew now and then).

The QARANC site do forward a lot of traffic to us because we have a set of 1 Million+ records of soldiers in hospital during the First World War. We've currently only managed to transcribe, index and digitise 100,000 of these which are all available on our site and integrated into our database of 6 million records. This collection has never seen the light of day before now and while it is available at the National Archives it is not indexed and is an incredibly difficult task to search through if you are looking for 1 man in 1 Million entries...

I paid my money only, as nathan states, to find that the information was in one case from the CWGC and in the other the London Gazette; both available free of charge.

We do not use any information from the CWGC. We use information from the Imperial War Graves Commission because we own copies of the ORIGINAL REGISTERS for British and Commonwealth deaths during the World Wars. In addition any records based on this collection include information that the IWGC registers and in turn the CWGC DO NOT HAVE. This includes medal entitlements, details on the history of the regiment and battalion and additional information based on the service and theatre of war.

And they were only listings, they were not the original documents.

We don't put up the original documents for a number of reasons, primarily however it is because our website architecture in its current form has not been designed to host images in such a way. The CWGC website has only recently been re-designed to display digital pictures of their original records. It is a difficult task for a small company that doesn't have the resources of Ancestry.

On top of that some of the information I have about my injured soldiers is nowhere to be found on this site.

You have my apologies for this but as mentioned above we have currently only put up about a tenth of the Medical Records collection. It takes time to transcribe and digitise such a massive document as these registers a task made more difficult by the fact they are all hand written. You have mentioned you have visited Kew on a few occassions so I'm sure you are aware of the condition of some collections in the archive and how quickly hand-written records can decay or how difficult older styles of handwriting can be to decipher anyway.

This information, particularly the number of records that are currently available in the medical records collection is plastered all over our site including, very obviously I might add, on the home page! It also states the number on the dedicated page for the medical records on our site! I'm very sorry you missed this information!

A complete waste of money and thanks for the heads up nathan - I will be cancelling my subscription pretty sharpish.

90% of our users would disagree with that statement, but thank you for sharing your opinion.

I don't expect TomBen to reply but it doesn't matter - I won't be using the site again anyway.

Aren't you lucky

Once again dissapointed175 and for anyone else reading;

IF YOU DON'T FIND SOMETHING ON OUR WEBSITE, ARE CONFUSED BY RESULTS YOU ARE GETTING THAT DONT SEEM TO MATCH YOUR SEARCH OR ARE STUCK IN ANY OTHER WAY GET IN TOUCH WITH FORCES WAR RECORDS AND WE WILL HELP YOU

I can't overstate that enough! We will help, we want to help, we will bend over backwards to help! We go to the Who Do You Think You Are Live Show in order to help people and that costs a tremendous amount of money! So much so in fact our company makes a loss every time we go, but there is nothing better than getting the chance to talk to people about their brick walls and hopefully smash them down with a large hammer!

In the end if you are completely dissatisfied with the site and the help you are receiving we are perfectly willing to provide a refund.

What we don't want to see though is this... A message from someone who clearly just wants to moan and is not actually interested in talking through a problem with us.

Kind Regards,

Tom