Free Access Ancestry & FindMyPast, Remembrance Weekend 2019 (General)

by Jefff , West London, Middlesex, Thursday, November 07, 2019, 16:58 (1631 days ago) @ Jefff

Hi all,
to recognise Remembrance Weekend both Ancestry and FindMyPast websites are offering free access to their Military records and apparently more besides, including it seems the 1939 Register.

Today I received an email newsletter from the "Who Do You Think You Are ?" website confirming the FindMyPast free access;

"From 12pm on Friday 8th November until 12pm on Remembrance Day on Monday 11th November, all records on Findmypast, excluding newspapers, electoral rolls and the Periodical Source Index, will be completely free to search and explore. This includes more than 85 million military records covering the British, American, Canadian, Australian, Irish and New Zealander armed forces."
I can confirm the 1939 Register is included within this free access, and it's search engine works very well, I think FMP is better than Ancestry for the Register. However as of Friday afternoon the FMP site is slow and keeps hiccupping but does eventually work - presumably due to heavy demand, hopefully things will improve later in the weekend.
https://www.findmypast.co.uk/page/free-access

Browsing the web shows details are more sketchy for the Ancestry free access, except to say the advertised access "for wartime records" is also available until Monday. I can confirm this access has already started, and does also include the 1939 Register.
https://www.ancestry.co.uk/cs/free-access?o_iid=102975&o_lid=102975&o_sch=Web+P...

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In the usual manner any new users will need to register their name and email address beforehand, but nothing more and no requests for payment, unless you stray away from the free datasets when using the websites. Registering will also mean you'll receive occasional and useful newsletter emails advising of events such as this, or informational research guides and so on, but no spam.

Hoping this helps, Jeff.