Ancestry.com...worth it?

[joylittle123]

Yes I do the same thing subscribe to ancestry during the winter months and between March & April I drop it again as you said Ancestry.com is pricey.

[jsimon208]

HI everyone. I know this thread has been dead for almost a year but I wanted to throw out some useful ideas that might help you get further in your searches and record verifications.

The first is to jump on the DNA bandwagon. I've met some people that are worried their DNA might not back up their paper genealogy. Well, that's nonsense. If you're following your paper trail you've got records to show immigration and births/deaths. The Ancestry.com DNA or 23andMe might not line up entirely but that isn't the useful part of it. It will show you matches of people in other family trees as well as your own that allow you to verify or rethink a certain line. The heritage aspect of Ancestry.com is in developement and gets better each year and you'll get revisions.

The second tip is still with the DNA tools. This one is GEDmatch.com! This little known tool allows you to download your raw dna data from whichever service you used and then upload it to the GEDmatch servers which are academic projects going on around the world. The wonderful part is that it is free! There is a huge learning curve but there are plenty of instructional videos on Youtube and blogs from professional genealogists on how to use this wonderful too.

With GEDmatch I was able to download both my raw DNA data and my ancestry.com's gedcom data and upload it to Gedmatch servers. It will help you line up more accurately (and more quickly) with other GEDcoms based on DNA. You'll get thousands of hits and they are automatically sorted by level of closeness along with contact details that are provided. I've met some cool family members that were 2nd cousins I had never even hard of before and we've worked together and found out trees intersect in various parts with other DNA matches.

I hope this short blurb has helped you.

[LKM]

I have found the same issues with ancestry.com and familysearch.org once you go back further then actual historical records. People want to push the family tree further back then it can be verified, and therefore you will find incorrect information. I have found people born several years (normally under 10 years, yet one on familysearch.org was around 400 years) after the death of the listed father, people born when a parent was under 10 years old, people with the same name listed as the same person (such as Anthony Morris son of Thomas Morris in a part of the UK when there were three men from different families in the whose fathers purchased land in the county that were born within 5 years of each other that fit this description), and other misleading information such as the claim that everyone with the same last name is descended from the same person (although this is the case with some names, it is not the case with most names). Most of the inaccurate information can be thrown out with basic logic, yet there are a few that have taken far longer to prove do not fit on my family tree.

If your family made a claim of arms that is on the books, that is one place that you can go for more reliable information then either of those web sites. Some of those claims of arms were fabricated, yet there are normally multiple sources from different branches of the family that can back each other up if it was not.

I have considered the DNA testing, yet the cost seems to more then the information that it would provide at the moment. I understand how family tree DNA and heredity work, and hope the price will go down after the initial R&D is payed off. I suspect my Y-DNA to be a subclade of R1b L21 as other family members have had this and the mtDNA could be anything.