RootsTech London 2019 and New Subscriptions

Thank you to all those who visited the Deceased Online team at last week's RootsTech London 

Demonstrating the database at RootsTech London

Jamie and the team from Deceased Online had a great time meeting the many thousands of visitors to the Excel centre in Docklands for RootsTech London. The stand saw a constant flow of visitors keen to find their ancestors in the burial and cremation records on Deceased Online database. We love meeting database users and would like to thank everyone who dropped by to see us on Thursday 24th, Friday 25th and Saturday 26th October.

RootsTech London 2019 was the first international RootsTech conference and has been hailed a tremendous success. RootsTech is a global family history event, hosted by FamilySearch International, where people of all ages learn to discover, share, and celebrate their family connections across generations through technology. The show was aimed at everyone - whatever their experience in family history or skill level in technology. Alongside big sponsors, local family history societies, and the Society of Genealogists, there were stands from all over the world, including Australia, France, Belgium, the USA, and Trinidad. We enjoyed meeting exhibitors and friends from family history organisations from across the country. The conference was also filled with exciting sessions, classroom talks, inspiring keynote speeches, informative demos, sponsors, connections, discoveries, and more.

The RootsTech team was keen to emphasize that the event is a place of connection and belonging. Everyone is welcome. Thursday’s general session began with an introduction from RootsTech London host, Nick Barratt (from Who Do You Think You Are UK), followed by keynote speaker, popular television personality and historian Dan Snow. Dan spoke of movingly of his own family history. On Friday, champion Paralympic athlete, Kadeena Cox, and FamilySearch CEO, Steve Rockwood, shared stories of courage, determination, and overcoming adversity. Saturday saw pop legend and lifelong member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), Donny Osmond, close the event with inspiring stories of his personal family history.

New Subscriptions

At Deceased Online we are introducing new ways to improve and expand our range of data, adding records from a greater number of cemeteries and crematoria across the UK, and giving our users the benefit of more regular additions of new records. These improvement plans will include changes to the way we offer annual subscriptions.

Our users range from the occasional family historian through to corporate users viewing many thousands of records a year. Until now we have not differentiated between types of user, but offered a single annual subscription option at £89 for unlimited views of most of our records. We’ve managed to resist the pressure to increase this price for over 5 years, since we first introduced subscriptions, even while users were expressing surprise at the generosity of the unlimited views offered. 

Users can still purchase a subscription for £89, although the terms have changed slightly. We have decided, in line with other on-line genealogy websites, to offer a range of subscriptions to suit customers according to how heavily they would like to use the site.

To do this we now offer three annual subscription options, each with a different limit to the number of records viewable.

The basic annual subscription, now called ‘Silver’, will remain at £89. However, we have introduced a limit of 450 record views for this subscription*, which we calculate will not affect the majority of our users. 

For heavier professional and corporate users of the site we have introduced the ‘Gold’ subscription at £249 for a maximum of 2000 views, and the ‘Platinum’ subscription at £499 for 5000 views.

We feel this is a fair and long-overdue revision of our subscriptions policy, which will help us to be more cost effective and allow us to expand and improve the website, which is what our customers want.

*Existing subscriptions will remain unlimited until expiry

Terms and Conditions We have amended Section 6 of the website Terms and Conditions to reflect the changes to subscriptions. We have also in Section 10 clarified the types of user we allow to use the website. In particular, we have made it clear that it is an abuse for registered users to distribute paid-for information from our website, via social media or by any other method, to others who are pursuing their own separate family history enquiries.

We always love meeting new database users and old friends at family history shows across the country. Did you visit RootsTech London this year? If so, let us know and feel free to tag us in your social media posts! We are @DeceasedOnline on Twitter and "Deceased Online" on Facebook.