Query - usefulness of uploading trees onto FindMyPast

[familydar]

Every Friday with great anticipation I go to the FindMyPast Fridays page to see if any of the latest batch of uploads might be of use to me.  I can then spend some considerable time doing lookups of the new datasets for my numerous brick walls.  Very rarely do I get a "hit" that is new to me (often the records are online elsewhere or else I've already bought the appropriate FHS cd)

I have a FindMyPast subscription and recently I've become aware of a notification (top right) which offers to do this time-consuming work for me if I upload my tree.  I'm sure others have done this.  For those of you who have been researching for a number of years and whose brick walls are back in the 1700s, is it proving useful?  Are you getting new "hits" every time a new dataset is loaded and how relevant are they in terms of date and location?

[PrawnCocktail]

I put mine up there, uploaded quite a big tree, with a lot of Cheshire in it.

But it only ever looked for matching records in half my tree (it was during the early days of FindMyPast having trees, it may work better now!), and then it found so many records in the other half, that I couldn't work through them all to find the ones that might be new information! All the Censuses, all the Civil Registrations ....

It might work better if you rebuilt your tree from scratch, which is what I did on Anc***, and can then work through one person at a time. It was a good opportunity to review the tree.

But as a short cut to checking the new records? Not for me, it wasn't!

[JanPennington]

I started my research on Find My past and build up a tree there.  I have found the hints that appear are useful.  But as with all hints/tips you have to look carefully before attaching the new details found.  I recently had 3 hints for a death for one person and when I looked at them I am not convinced any are correct.
On the plus side I have been given hints for census records which have give me the names of relatives I didn't know about and I find it easier to search for more census records on Find My Past.  That may be because I have used this site more than others.
Jan

[andrewalston]

The search for hints seems to be minimal.

I worked up a tree for a friend whose roots were deeply in Shropshire, where FindMyPast have a great many parish registers filmed and indexed.

I've just checked the copy I uploaded to FindMyPast, and the hints seem to ignore the parishes. For example, there's a Maria Williams baptised at Church Stretton in 1806 and married at Benthall in 1824. The hints for her include the Banns and marriage, but not the baptism, which appears if I search manually. Two "Mary Williams" baptisms are suggested, in other parts of Shropshire.

However, hints do correctly show some census entries under her married name, which Ancestry never considers.