Convince me to pay for Ancestry.com

In My Humble Opinion
1

At Christmas, my mother distributed to all my siblings & I copies of a family tree that our great aunt (now deceased) put together many years ago. The records of course get spottier the farther back it goes (relatives who lived in the mid-to-late 1800s.) One day last week on a whim, I opened a basic (free) ancestry.com account and plugged in all the info. I’m getting hits, meaning records that may be related to my relatives. Of course, to access these records, I have to pay up.

I’m on the fence about joining. I’m interested in finding out my family history, but I’m not sure. For one thing, the site is a bit confusing to navigate. For another thing, there’s the thought that perhaps there really isn’t anything all that interesting to find out about my family.

So, I’m tossing it out to you. Has anyone ever used this site and found anything remarkable about their family history? How efficient are the searches, and would you reccomend me shelling out for it?

2

Did you sign up for the two week free trial? You should be able to view the actual records then (at least, that’s how it worked when I did it a few years ago).

Ancestry has a ton of info, census records, etc. and can help fill in missing details in your family tree, connect to distant relatives and the like. I’ve found it quite useful. You need to take the information other members have posted with a grain of salt. People have posted a lot of incorrect data to their trees.

It’s too expensive for me to keep an ongoing account, but what I’ve done a few times over the years is sign up for the monthly deal, do a bunch of research then cancel it again by the end of the month.

3

I’m about 3/4 through my first year of service, and I’ll probably pay up for a second year.

I love the Census data. Then again, Family Search also had Census data for free (pilot.familysearch.org, I think). I was excited to see which cemetery the government sent a headstone to for an ancestor who fought for the Union in the Civil War. State Census information has been useful, too, which I probably wouldn’t have found without Ancestry. An 1860 slave schedule was eye-opening.

As far as the family trees go, genealogy by committee can be misleading. You’ll be able to view other peoples’ family trees (those that are public; some are private), but sometimes people get caught up in the excitement of discovery and post incorrect information, so don’t believe everything. Those hints you’ve gotten could be major new information, or they could simply be a slightly different date or location.

I’ve only recently started looking at the discussion forum section, and have been disappointed in that area – not enough current activity to be useful, but some of the old discussions can still offer clues worth following up. Someone posted a lengthy book excerpt that may potentially identify an old family photo of a younger brother who went west to seek his fortune. We’re still working on that one.

There’s different levels of service that you may want to be aware of. Are there recent immigrants in your family? Access to international searches costs more.

You may also have luck checking graves registration websites. Find a Grave is big, and I think internment.net is another that’s been useful, plus Genweb sites. Genforum may also have some clues for you. You may find several researchers working on your family.

Ancestry’s a useful research tool, but you’ll want to use other resources as well.

4

Many libraries offer Ancestry.com Library Edition, which may be helpful. However, I believe there is content in the full subscription that is not in the Library Edition.

5

I have subscribed for 2 years and spent probably close to 1000 quality hours mapping out all family lines as far as reasonable. Ancestry.com is good but you still have to have good research skills. It isn’t something that you just type in a name and go back 200 years although that is possible too for some lines if you think the prior research is good enough. Most of my family was pretty easy because everyone has been in the U.S. since it was invented and even back to the 1st Colony at Jamestown. However, I had one mystery branch on my maternal grandmother’s side of the family that no one knew much about at all including my mother. I made some big breakthroughs on that recently to figure it out and my mother has some missing 1st cousins that she never knew and is thinking about contacting.

It is addictive if you really get into it. The main problem I have is that there is simply too much information. If you want to go back only 3 or 4 generations or so, it is easy to use ancestry.com to make up a chart but then you find you want to push further and further until you have so much that you don’t know what to do with it. I have several hundred X grandparents mapped at this point and could go back even more but you have to stop, polish what you have, cross-check and then share which takes time.

I found lots of things that people didn’t know about. Some were historical which is good but some were family branches that had many more members than the collective memory accounted for and that is a little uncomfortable. It triggered some interesting conversations with my elderly grandparents on both sides. Some things they either never knew or just chose to forget about.

6

Yes. I had a pretty good family tree put together on my own, but then I used Ancestry and found a great-great-grandfather who had acted against the KKK in the 1870s. There was a copy of a letter he had written to the feds describing in detail a Klan attack on some of his black neighbors, and describing how he had himself been attacked by a Klan mob.

There was also a picture of the guy with some woodworking tools, which is pretty cool because I own a piece of furniture he made.

Despite having already done a lot of genealogical work elsewhere, I was able to find many of previously-unknown-to-me ancestors with interesting stories.

And I get equal joy out of sharing my own pictures and stories of ancestors with others. (One complaint I have is that there aren’t as many old pictures on the site as Ancestry’s advertising suggests. I try to do my part to remedy that by uploading all the old family pics I can.)

As for difficulty with navigating the site, they have just recently (within the past few days) rolled out a new, easier-to-navigate layout.

One cool thing is that when you put together your tree the site allows you to invite relatives to take a look and even edit the tree (at no extra charge).

I agree with justpassingthrough that you have to be careful of incorrect information posted by amateur-and-overly-credulous family genealogists. This is particularly a problem when you get back to Revolutionary War veterans and farther back to colonial ancestors. Everyone wants to have an ancestor who was in the Revolution and everyone wants to have an ancestor who was at Jametown or Plymouth, and people tend to get sloppy in their eagerness to find those connections.

If you’re not sure, sign up for the month-to-month subscription. If you don’t like it, you’re only on the hook for a month. If do you like the experience, you can sign up for a longer subscription when your monthly subscription expires.

7

It’s been worth it for me. I love the census data, and the ability to see the original documents. I have filled in a lot of my family tree due to Ancestry.

8

It really depends on what you want to do. I’ve had Ancestry for three years or so now. Lately I haven’t been doing as much lately though but I’m sure I’ll keep it going. You do not need to pay to search the family trees and the message boards. You can also get census data from other places for free, but it might be a bit more to search through.

I will say though not to believe anything from someone else’s family tree. A lot of people just see someone with a similar name and take it without really looking into it. My grandmother was added to someone’s tree a couple of years ago and they added some guy as her son. So now my grandmother is attached to a ton of trees that she shouldn’t be. Mary is a common first name people.

You’ll find a lot of better information at the local historical society or library. I’m lucky in that regard because my father’s side of the family all came here and then just stayed.

Also remember to cite, cite, cite. Just like here if there’s no cite then don’t believe it.

9

The Family Tree Maker program will automatically link everyone in your tree to data on the Ancestry site (if it exists). This is indicated by a small leaf symbol near the name of the ancestor. Clicking on the leaf will show you other peoples’ trees that have your same ancestor and what information they have on that person. This seems like a goldmine of information, and it can be. The problem is that, as mentioned, many people just copy bad information that is already out there and repost it in their own trees, thus making it look like everybody has arrived at the same info independently.

This became quickly obvious to me when I noted that some eight different people had indicated that one of our common ancestors was born in Massachusetts in 1607, which is obviously impossible. There are a lot of genealogists who source their information, so it’s wise to stick with those to some extent, although many list other family trees as their sources, which is a very poor idea.

Ancestry is best used for its official document sources such as census records and other vital statistic information, since you don’t have to request it from elsewhere and then wait for the result.

10

It will also, if it can, show you such things as census records and other records that they have, though it does show trees first.

I will use what I find in people’s trees, but I make a note to myself to make sure I actually look into it. There have been times when people remove their tree and I never took note of what they had. I don’t believe what they’ve written outright, but it is at least a starting point.

I’ve stopped using Family Tree Maker the program though. I don’t like the changes they’ve done, and the reports they have now just don’t include all of the information I’d like, or they put it in some strange order.

11

Ancestry is one of my mainstays for genealogy research.

You don’t have to go to 3 or 4 different websites to search censuses and immigration records. They have a good and growing selection of previously-published family histories, biographies, military histories, and publications from various historical societies and organizations. These can be searched by name and/or keyword as well.

HOWEVER, this may help you delay your entry into paid research:

This is the LDS’ Family Search pilot project. I wish it had been available sooner. Keep in mind that this is a pilot project and more data are being added all the time. However, they have lots and lots of records there already. They don’t have all of the censuses (Ancestry does), but they have most of them. I haven’t seen immigration records on the LDS site (Ancestry has a fairly complete immigration records collection), but Family Search also has some collections from foreign countries that would cost you a lot more on Ancestry, assuming Ancestry has those collections.

While I agree that folks should not indiscriminately use other people’s trees due to many repeated errors and people just willy-nilly taking info from another tree and putting it into their own tree, there are some trees that are well researched (my own, for example) and took years to put together and verify. Anyhow, just perusing those family trees can give you an idea of places to look when/if you hit a brick wall. But never take one as gospel and without some verification on your part.

Ancestry allows members to include citations in their trees. Those of us who are serious will upload photos (when available) and images of documents or at least cite the name of the resource, when it was published, and may add an excerpt from the source. I have cited many vital records in my own, although I haven’t gotten around to digitizing and uploading them yet.

If you’re a member you can see the citations in trees and judge for yourself.

Another site that is of great benefit if your ancestors were here early and in New England is the NEHGS (newenglandancestors.org). Massachusetts was anal about gathering and digitizing records. If your ancestors were ever in New England, especially prior to 1900, NEHGS is invaluable. I believe they now have a reciprocal business relationship with ancestry and various newspaper archives.

However, the real gold in NEHGS is their early vital records and their many preserved early publications (deeds, court records, wills and probate, etc.).

As an aside, if you think we’re a litigious society now, we could not hold a candle to lawsuits in the 18th century. Suing someone for something was practically a national past-time. The good thing about that is that records were kept. :slight_smile:

Also, look up your local LDS family research center. They still have a few collections that aren’t available “out in the wild” yet. At one point I actually hired an LDS researcher who was selling hours on Ebay and was very pleased with their work. He had easy access to the record collections and sent the digitized records along with their findings. Saved me a trip or two.

Go to FamilySearch.org to see what holdings they have. Some of them are already on the pilot site noted above. If not, you can always find an LDS center, call them, ask them for the collection you’re interested in, and they can order it if they don’t have immediate access to it.

If you need any help or a new perspective, just let us know. It took me 3 years to track down my correct paternal line, and I’m still working on the maternal line. It’s a lot of work.

12

What are you using now? I’m also not a few of the last few “upgrades” to FTM.

13

Lately I haven’t been doing much at all really. Lots of personal things going on. That said I’m trying to switch my tree to Roots Magic, which doesn’t look as nice, but I find the reports better and a few other little things seem to let me have more control over.

I also use PAF as I’m working on a descendant project that so far has 30,000 people in it. I find PAF much much faster in the ability to enter basic facts.

14

I’ve had a subscription to ancestry.com for six years, and can recommend it as well worth while. However, many public libraries have a subscription to ancestry.com, which library users can access for free. Some libraries even let card holders access the subscription from their home computers with a valid library card number. You might want to check with your local library before spending any money.

15

So is the subscription just to search their records, not to actually store the family tree? Like… if make a family tree this month, but then I get busy and can’t work on it again for a year, is it at least viewable if I don’t keep my subscription? Or does the whole thing go poof?

16

One very nice thing (if you have FTM as your default program) is the “merge” feature. If you find a reliable link and want to transfer information to your own tree, click “merge” and the program goes through a series of windows asking whether or not you want to include or ignore each fact. Beats writing all that info down and then typing it into your tree, especially if you’re looking at a family with 12 kids.

17

I own stock in it…so please join! :slight_smile:

My wife loves it but I haven’t quizzed her as to why…but she loves it.

18

This looks interesting. I just did one of my periodic cancelings of Ancestry, but may pay the piper for this site. I have a LOT of New England roots dating back to the Mayflower, and several holes in my tree. Thanks for the heads up.

19

As always, YMMV, but I was disappointed. First of all, according to some consumer reports I’ve seen, you don’t get much during the trial period that you wouldn’t get anyway, without signing up.

My paternal ancestors have been traced to the early 1600s, and putatively hundreds of years before that. An extensive genealogy was published in the 1980s (three volumes published in different years). For at least the past 160 years they’ve left an extensive paper trail of university degrees and war records, beginning with the Civil War. We have an unusual name. But on Ancestry.com I couldn’t find a thing about them; I couldn’t even find them at all, and this was when we were paying members.

20

I had the same issue when I paid for a subscription a few years ago. Then again, both sides of my family have only been in this country since right before World War I.