Anybody use Ancestry.com?
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After taking a look at the family records when I visited, I registered over the weekend, and started monkeying about with it. Quite an interesting process, and I find it surprisingly easy to trace the family back to the 19th century, and in a couple of cases the 18th. Given a few weeks I should be able to fill in a lot of blanks.
What was a little disappointing was the relative inability to get details about people outside the standard birth/marriage/death dates, although I guess that's not really surprising. What we really need is some kind of database of Family Scandals, but that's not happening.
Anybody else used it? If so, any tips?
@Doctor-Phibes We have been playing with it for a while. It can be interesting and highly addicting! Fun to search through history! Watch the source for a suggestion, though. A lot of them are just wrong. An official document, like a census, is just a name and date written by some illiterate census taker. Or the information comes from someone else's family tree and they got it wrong. Then the error takes on a new life. Our ancestors did things like name multiple generations the same name. Change the spelling of the name. Marry 3 times and name the kids with each wife the same name! Not marry at all and name the kids the same name. Wills are my favorite resources. That's where you can find the dirt! "To my 4th son, I leave nothing for dishonouring the family name." Hmmm! Now I know it's my family!
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@Doctor-Phibes We have been playing with it for a while. It can be interesting and highly addicting! Fun to search through history! Watch the source for a suggestion, though. A lot of them are just wrong. An official document, like a census, is just a name and date written by some illiterate census taker. Or the information comes from someone else's family tree and they got it wrong. Then the error takes on a new life. Our ancestors did things like name multiple generations the same name. Change the spelling of the name. Marry 3 times and name the kids with each wife the same name! Not marry at all and name the kids the same name. Wills are my favorite resources. That's where you can find the dirt! "To my 4th son, I leave nothing for dishonouring the family name." Hmmm! Now I know it's my family!
@Nanna said in Anybody use Ancestry.com?:
@Doctor-Phibes We have been playing with it for a while. It can be interesting and highly addicting! Fun to search through history! Watch the source for a suggestion, though. A lot of them are just wrong. An official document, like a census, is just a name and date written by some illiterate census taker. Or the information comes from someone else's family tree and they got it wrong. Then the error takes on a new life. Our ancestors did things like name multiple generations the same name. Change the spelling of the name. Marry 3 times and name the kids with each wife the same name! Not marry at all and name the kids the same name. Wills are my favorite resources. That's where you can find the dirt! "To my 4th son, I leave nothing for dishonouring the family name." Hmmm! Now I know it's my family!
Yes, the errors creep in very quickly. A servant from the 1800's is included in a census, and then it's assumed that they are a family member. This happened twice - one part of my family had a servant, and another descendent from a different branch was a servant. In both cases they were incorrectly identified as being children of the family.
I'll have to look out for wills. I need scandal!
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Played with it for a while, but eventually the benefit was not worth the cost.
Searching was limited to when my parents/grandparents immigrated in the middle of the last century. Anything before that is non-existent, at least to Ancestry.com. I'm sure that any ancestral records predating that are long since lost in the invasions that my forbears endured.
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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Played with it for a while, but eventually the benefit was not worth the cost.
Searching was limited to when my parents/grandparents immigrated in the middle of the last century. Anything before that is non-existent, at least to Ancestry.com. I'm sure that any ancestral records predating that are long since lost in the invasions that my forbears endured.
@George-K said in Anybody use Ancestry.com?:
Played with it for a while, but eventually the benefit was not worth the cost.
It's not particularly cheap - I'm most likely going to do it for a while, and then save and quit.
I did discover I'd been living for a time about 1/4 mile from a long-lost relative, both of us in a completely different town many miles from where we grew up (and we'd grown up 100's of miles from one another), which was a bit weird. Neither of us had any idea, of course.
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Played with it for a while, but eventually the benefit was not worth the cost.
Searching was limited to when my parents/grandparents immigrated in the middle of the last century. Anything before that is non-existent, at least to Ancestry.com. I'm sure that any ancestral records predating that are long since lost in the invasions that my forbears endured.
@George-K It can be difficult to trace back. My family is mostly from Virginia, so we can go back pretty far in the US and then UK. Ancestry does have some international resources, but they cost more, of course. Mr. Nanna's family is more interesting. They came from Europe to PA and then migrated all over the US. Lots of interfaith marriages...Quakers married outside the Meeting. Christians married Jews. Episcopalians married Methodists. Scandals everywhere!
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I don't need to. Other family members have already documented it and put it on a website back to the 1600's.
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@George-K said in Anybody use Ancestry.com?:
Played with it for a while, but eventually the benefit was not worth the cost.
It's not particularly cheap - I'm most likely going to do it for a while, and then save and quit.
I did discover I'd been living for a time about 1/4 mile from a long-lost relative, both of us in a completely different town many miles from where we grew up (and we'd grown up 100's of miles from one another), which was a bit weird. Neither of us had any idea, of course.
@Doctor-Phibes We had a cousin do the genetic testing part of Ancestry and found a cousin we didn't know about. A childless Aunt had a child she gave up for adoption as an Army nurse in the Korean War. It could have been an episode of the TV show, "MASH".
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I use it... my goal, which I fail nearly every day, is to log in once a day and fill in 3 more family members. I agree there are many more incomplete/conflicting records that make it harder than I expected to trace the tree... but it's still a fun process. Not an ego thing at all, but I'd love to make a massive family tree and then publish it for my family and relatives to use and... even someone 100 years ago finding it and thinking "wow, I'm glad someone took the time to do this".
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I use it... my goal, which I fail nearly every day, is to log in once a day and fill in 3 more family members. I agree there are many more incomplete/conflicting records that make it harder than I expected to trace the tree... but it's still a fun process. Not an ego thing at all, but I'd love to make a massive family tree and then publish it for my family and relatives to use and... even someone 100 years ago finding it and thinking "wow, I'm glad someone took the time to do this".
@89th said in Anybody use Ancestry.com?:
I use it... my goal, which I fail nearly every day, is to log in once a day and fill in 3 more family members. I agree there are many more incomplete/conflicting records that make it harder than I expected to trace the tree... but it's still a fun process. Not an ego thing at all, but I'd love to make a massive family tree and then publish it for my family and relatives to use and... even someone 100 years ago finding it and thinking "wow, I'm glad someone took the time to do this".
I'm really regretting I didn't do it sooner. My parents both knew quite a bit of family history, but it was going through their stuff that motivated me to start, and of course I can't check it with them.
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@89th said in Anybody use Ancestry.com?:
I use it... my goal, which I fail nearly every day, is to log in once a day and fill in 3 more family members. I agree there are many more incomplete/conflicting records that make it harder than I expected to trace the tree... but it's still a fun process. Not an ego thing at all, but I'd love to make a massive family tree and then publish it for my family and relatives to use and... even someone 100 years ago finding it and thinking "wow, I'm glad someone took the time to do this".
I'm really regretting I didn't do it sooner. My parents both knew quite a bit of family history, but it was going through their stuff that motivated me to start, and of course I can't check it with them.
@Doctor-Phibes Interesting. I've had that thought before that one day I will probably regret not asking my uncles, grandparents, etc... before it was too late.
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My Ancestry.com experience has been a bit interesting. I'm slightly more than 50% confident I know who my biological parents are, based on:
- a biological first cousin on Ancestry, and how they fit in with
- what I know about my biological parents and
- known dates and locations
I have no idea what to do with this information. On the one hand, there are very good reasons why the contact procedure is what it is. On the other, Maryland's is completely broken and ridiculous, so going through proper channels, there'd be absolutely no way to even know any of this, let alone contact anybody.
It weirds me out just thinking about it, so likely I'll just let it sit and do nothing.
