Raggytash's comments about this Forces Records website remind me of those shysters who show up at highland games and folk festivals with a booth full of tartan tat and promises to research "your" family coat of arms or clan badge. Of course, a coat of arms belongs *only* to the direct lineal descendant(s) of the person to whom it was originally granted, but these fakers just look up your name in a Great Big Book of Heraldry and assert that the heraldic device they find beside your family name "belongs" to you. Then they start drawing up a purchase order for a fancy certificate and any God's quantity of official tea towels, pewter key fobs and laser-cut glassware, all with "your" coat of arms or clan badge on them.

Forces Records seems to have done away with the part where they actually look up your name in a Great Big Book of Something Or Other. That's quite a wheeze, and I bet their negative-option billing technique makes it obscenely profitable.

With the possible exception of Australian war records, I have never heard of a system or method that makes genealogical research (or indeed any historical research using archival materials) anything but a hell of a lot of painstaking work that inevitably includes travel to the relevant repository(ies) and waiting for the staff to find the relevant records in huge fonds that may or may not be helpfully arranged and annotated.

If there's a free lunch in archival research, it's located right beside the leprechaun's pot of gold.