Ancestry.com...worth it?

[Steve Ashton]

Ancestry.com is a tool. I gives you access to records and data. You must still do the work.

My wife was able to find records that we didn't even know or dream about. But the records must already exist and be uploaded. It is only as good as who has uploaded the records.
And of course not everything is on a computer or accessible.

The linking that the Ancestry.com does is your data to another member's data. If you both link to the same person or record it will tell you. We are still getting messages that someone else has linked to some of our data two years after we stopped the subscription.

[iKiltIt]

Ancestry.com is a tool. I gives you access to records and data. You must still do the work.

My wife was able to find records that we didn't even know or dream about. But the records must already exist and be uploaded. It is only as good as who has uploaded the records.
And of course not everything is on a computer or accessible.

The linking that the Ancestry.com does is your data to another member's data. If you both link to the same person or record it will tell you. We are still getting messages that someone else has linked to some of our data two years after we stopped the subscription.

Its so weird how they advertise that they can find your relatives but cant if someone hasn't already linked to it...My Grandmother has ours dated back to mid to late 1700's, I think. I remember seeing that book that she had made and my mother still has it and is sending it to me. I am so interested in exactly where I came from, but I'm afraid ill never really know. I do know that my fathers side came from the Angus area of Scotland and my Mothers side (the one with my grandmothers genealogy that Im getting) came from some parts of Scotland and Wales but again, I'm not sure exactly where with her side.

[Pleater]

My uncle had been trying to locate his father's family and any male relatives with his surname for decades. He even engaged a private detective to help in the search. I got a free trial of Ancestry and asked all the female relatives I could find if there were male relatives.

Two weeks before he died my brother took him the news that direct male descendants of his uncle are living in California.

The family tree I made is still there in Ancestry, as is the one my uncle made, plus all the messages and records I collected up.

There were lots of incorrect entries - granddad changed his date of birth, his middle name and married a second time without benefit of divorce from his first wife, but that is all part of the fun - and I found I had a cousin I knew nothing about living only a short distance away.
It helps to be able to read 'secretary hand' as many of the people changing the written records into typed ones can't read what is there - and they obviously didn't care much about accuracy.

I still haven't paid anything for the access I have had, but they do keep informing me of offers they have - it might be worthwhile to watch for free trials or cheap deals so as to be able to have access and see what you can find.

Anne the Pleater

[tundramanq]

When I chased my tree years ago almost all the sites were free.
I found that I needed all the data from each generation from multiple sites to cross check the previous and next generations. Tracking children and wives names and data as well as the places and times of a subjects life events gives you the multiple connections to ensure correctness. It has also let me bridge a lost generation and enabled vetting it from the other direction.
The computer acronym GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) applies to the data accuracy and errors were rampant on all the sites. Never accept any site suggested generation linkages unless you can vet it multiple ways on independent sites.

Finding someone else's tree is nice but like your prime search it still needs vetting the same labor intensive way for every step.

It was an adventure and I found a lot of real "characters" in my tree - good and bad. Open Google searching names and dates you have found can come up with some memorable kin stories and biographies - as well as vetting.

[CDNSushi]

Pretty sure that Ancestry.com has links to the LDS (Mormon) church, for good or ill. I don't know the full details, but I've always been uncomfortable with the potential that my ancestors might (figuratively) dug up by others, only to be baptised by proxy into the LDS church.

So while I've always been curious about my roots, I just can't bring myself to open family information up to sources that I'm not confident about, so I've had to basically abandon any notion of having any serious research done. I've tried out Ancestry.com, and found it really, really, really, really, REALLY difficult, borderline impossible to close my account with them and have the information I provided, purged from the site. I basically had to threaten litigation before they honoured my requests. And of course, at that point, I wanted nothing more to do with them.

[Lyle1]

I've used Ancestry.com for about seven years, and I am amazed by the number and types of records that are avialable. I have the international account, and I think it is well worth paying extra for access to records from countries outside of the United States of America.

Yes, the transcribers sometimes make mistakes when entering the information on into the searchable database and that does make it more difficult to find the record. However, unless the searcher specifically requests an exact match to his search strategy, the Ancestry search system returns the most likely relevant records first, and then presents records that are less likely to be what you hope to find. If you do find errors in the transcribed record, you can submit corrections, which will be evaluated and added to the record if found to be creditable.

Once you click on a link to a record, you will see a printed copy of what the transcriptionist reported, but many records also contain a link to a photograph of the record, which often contains more information than what the transcriptionist recorded. For example, some records record occupations and street addresses that are not not copied into the searchable database, but which can be quite helpful. Whether or not a photograph is included is at the discretion of the entity that holds the document. Photographs are not available for Scottish census records, but more information is included in the transcribed record than for US Census records for which photographs are available.

I have traced several lines on my family back hundreds of years, using Ancestry.com. Many records that I found were from churches, historical societies, and local government repositories in an area where I once lived before I knew I had ancestors who had lived there. I could have found some of the records by traveling around to where the records were held, but some records would not have been available to the public before Ancestry.com contracted to digitalize them.

The terms of use are very clearly presented on Ancestry.com, if take the time to read them. If you do not agree to the terms, don't subscribe to the service. I spent many years of experience searching online database systems before I retired, and I have some knowledge of what is involved in the construction of a database and how much it costs. I do not find Ancestry's terms or fees to be out of line; the yearly fees for many other database systems I have used often exceed $10,000. As someone has already stated, the Ancestry collects, houses, and makes the information available, but you must work to find the information and to determine if it really relates to your ancestors. You can choose to make your tree/s public, which allows other users to view them, or they can be private, which means that only users to whom you give access can view your tree/s.

Another nice feature of Ancestry.com is that you can make contact with other users, who might be willing to share information. I have made contact with several distant cousins who have been quite helpful. One recently shared information about an illegitimate birth in the 1870s (which other users pretended never happened) that proved that a strange old lady, who attended many family holiday functions when I was a child, was a 2nd cousin twice removed. That knowledge is not really very important, but I liked the lady, and knowing that there was a family connection is somehow comforting now that she is dead.

I download copies of my trees to a genealogical software package that is compatible with Ancestry.com, and I periodically run the update feature that downloads any information that I have added to my Ancestry.com tree/s since the last download.

[Jack Daw]

If you are a serious amateur genealogist, it's worth it. A part of the value of a hobby is the past time gleaning small nuggets from painstaking research here and there, and some of that you may get from Ancestry.com. If you're an amateur archeologist, the fossils don't jump out of the ground to find you.

[TheMcManus]

It is my understanding that the Ancestry.com DNA testing is not all together very good.
For example they use only a sample of 100 people from the West coast of Ireland as the "Irish" baseline.