Anybody use Ancestry.com?
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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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@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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@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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@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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@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.
Proud supporter of Plan 2525. Everything you think, do and say will be in the pill you took today.
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@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.
