Anyone use Ancestry.com?

[cartisdm]

I was curious about looking into some of my family background, mostly centered around my grandfather on my dad's side. They have a 14 day trial so I'll go collect as much family info before I sign up but I was curious to see if anyone on here has used the website or something similar. How were your results?

 

[Dave]

Did the free trial back when it was 30 days (about two years ago.) Some good tools and I found stuff that I'd have never found with just Google - like photo copies of county registers and such.
However, I'm lazy (and cheap) and it was still too much work for me to want to spend any cash on it. Interesting, but I wasn't into it enough.

 

[Kidrock]

Facebook is way better and free.

 

[cartisdm]

Facebook is way better and free.

Unfortunately, Facebook isn't much help outside of cousin's and random extended family. I'm not really too curious about them as much as tracking down my Grandfather's info who passed away when I was much younger. :dunno:

 

[FireDoc83]

I have used them and still do. I have come across many different documents and people to help build my family tree. I have it built all the way back to my family who came from Germany.

 

[Highlander]

I did a lot of research about 10 years ago, some of it with ancestry.

Ancestry can be good with a few cautions:

Family trees posted by users can be dead wrong. Do not trust them without sourcing the data yourself. In my tree on my dads side, many have the line back to English nobility and there is no evidence supporting it whatsoever and a lot disproving it.

Try as much as you can to get copies of the online scanned documents that Ancestry has (which is very good) yourself from an alternate source. A good genealogist will have source copies for everything.

The site is great for finding things that you can't travel to see, and a good beginning point.

 

[Dread]

I just signed up and within 5 minutes I found my grandfathers merchant marine academy picture from 1953. Honestly that really blew my mind. He passed when I was 17 so I never really got to know him all that well and Ive always regretted that and wanted to learn more.