Stirnet’s Membership Scheme
MEMBERSHIP PROVIDES UNINTERRUPTED VIEWING OF OUR RENOWNED FAMILIES DATABASE.
Also: as long as you have paid once for Membership, you may benefit from The Stirnet Portal.
Any questions? See Membership FAQ.
Because I support open-sharing of information over the Internet, I am pleased to provide much of this site for free. However, the Families Database has taken many thousands of hours of work and, to keep working on it, I really do need to obtain income from it. To arrange that, I have developed a Membership Scheme under which viewing of the Families Database is interrupted unless the site visitor has logged-in as a STIRNET MEMBER. To obtain membership, I ask that you EITHER contribute information which we accept as helping us improve this site OR make a financial contribution which helps us finance my work.
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– Free Membership (for a period) may be provided to those I think have made a meaningful contribution to the site (or are likely to do so). I set out below the criteria I use for this. To avoid disappointment, please do read those criteria. If they are not met then I will not provide Free Membership. | |
| – Other people may Purchase Membership (for a period). The subscription options, which are clearly displayed within the Registration & Subscription Process, are £10 for 14 days of uninterrupted viewing, £15 for 31 days, £30 for 93 days, and £60 for 365 days. Subscription fee history shows how the costs have changed over the years in and provides examples of the fees in some other currencies. Most people pay by PayPal using the Subscription Process led to when you Register (see that link above). However, some people prefer to pay by Bank Transfer or Sterling Cheque. |
I have provided a lot of information in the site to help you make up your mind about whether or not to subscribe for Stirnet Membership. Most questions about Membership are on Membership FAQ. For specific questions about the Families Database, please see About the database. For general questions about our Families Database, please see Families Database FAQ.
| Stirnet Membership is needed to benefit from the Families Database which may be able to save you much time & effort with your research. A huge amount of properly-sourced data is provided for what may cost you less than a trip to your nearest reference library. No site can be all things to all people and the database will not help everyone. However, it has certainly already helped many people, having provided them with many hours of entertainment and enabled them to produce family trees in just a few hours that may otherwise have taken them years to produce – and it is getting bigger & better almost every day. | I know of quite a few people (and there are probably many others) who have found the database to be so useful to them that they have introduced their friends & family to the site. I operate a Referral Policy that may encourage you to do so also. |
If you are new to Stirnet, I suggest that you have a good look around the site in general and our Families Database in particular. The section on Frequently Asked Questions is a good place to start. I think that, if you are interested in Genealogy or any other aspect of Family History, you will come to agree that it is worth your while to support this site by purchasing Membership.
FREE MEMBERSHIP
If you make what we accept as a ‘meaningful contribution’ to the development of this site, I may (at my discretion) offer you free membership of the Membership Scheme for a period. For the purposes of obtaining Free Membership, ‘meaningful contributions’ will normally need to involve helping me develop or improve our FAMILIES DATABASE but I will certainly open to suggestions on other ways to improve this site. However, I cannot afford to be too generous with this and I hope that those who can afford to pay for their membership will do so even though they might qualify for Free Membership (see Help us). I do appreciate the support that many paid-up Members provide us voluntarily.
It is unlikely that I will accept as ‘meaningful’ any data for the Families Database that:
(1) is not connected to someone who is already in the database; and
(2) does not relate to British or Irish families or their early Continental ancestors; and
(3) relates to generations born after 1800; or
(4) is not supported by information (such as the identification of sources) that gives me comfort that the data is reliable (for this purpose I may sometimes accept “family records”, or similar, where I believe it appropriate to do so); or
(5) is provided in any of the database’s main sources (as reported on Sources & Acknowledgements) unless you are correcting an error or resolving an uncertainty (for it is likely that I would produce that data myself in due course); or
(6) is subject to copyright constraints (other than the identification of sources, which is something I do anyway); or
(7) is modest in volume or effect; or
(8) is not in a format which I can access or use with ease (I do not like gedcom).
However, it is possible that I will accept as meaningful any data that:
– helps me correct errors or resolve uncertainties reported in the data; or
– is of a reasonable volume; and
– comes from one or more sources to which we do not have easy access.
I am not always as quick as I should be at responding to requests so I suggest that, if you wish to obtain a favourable response from me reasonably quickly, you look at the note entitled Hints for best results on the Contact us page.
Except for applications covered by the Referral Policy, to apply for Free Membership you just have to tell me, by e-mail, what sort of contribution you would like to make, providing me with enough detail to enable me to make a decision. Many people have simply sent me their data and trusted me to be fair to them. I have been. Understandably, others have been more cautious. So can I be. Please note that, from my point of view, I still have so much information at hand which has yet to be uploaded, and so much correspondence yet to be processed, that I am not looking out for extra data for the database at the moment (except where I have specifically asked for it) whilst I am not yet ready for a push for contributions to Stirnet Histories. Nevertheless, I do welcome data that will enable me to make a meaningful improvement to the site even if I do not have time to use it right away.
Please be patient if it takes me time to sort out your application. I am not always as quick as perhaps I should be in dealing with correspondence. In fact, the main thing holding me back from providing Free Membership is often that I do not have the time to investigate and/or use the information being offered so please do make it easy for me to approach your request positively. In other words, please do take into account the criteria mentioned in the note alongside.