In Ancestry worth it if you don't know the names of your relatives?

SootySweep1

Hi
My mum has been researching her family tree and through ancestry she has been able to find & make contact with relatives in Australia and other parts of the world who were also using ancestry.

She was able to confirm that it was correct because they could see where the family trees overlapped.

Jen

pseudodox

Joining Ancestry is like joining a gym - if you don't use it very often it is expensive.  If you are there a few times a week, or even daily, it is good value.

Beware of any online trees - there are a lot of fantasists out there, especially ones who claim to go back to Adam & Eve.  I have a couple in my tree in early 1700s who others have given 15 children.  Which is perfectly reasonable in past centuries, except the wife would have had most of them in her 60s, 70s & the youngest when she was 84!  And another tree owner is so proud of his WW1 soldier - fighting for his country in 1918 at the age of 117!

Don't believe anything until you see documentary evidence with your own eyes.

RAS

Grumpelstiltskin said:

The problem with late 20th century family history is you ay find a birth record in say 1970s but after that you are not suddenly going to find out where they are today.

This depends. If you are in Ancestry, they may throw out an electoral record or two for you to assess, some of which are as recent as 2018. I don't know what Findmypast offers.

What you can't do is assume that a) it is the correct person, b) that if it's a woman in particular it not the right person just because the surname is different. What you can do is use 192.com to find other people of the same name at the same address and then explore the relationships between them.

I've a woman who I knew married three times and had children from two marriages. I found her first marriage and two children from Ancestry BMD indexes. Thanks to her children's Facebook pages, I found her most recent surname and her current husband, so tracked her third marriage, for which she used her second husband's surname........  Takes time and some people opt out of the public register.

192.com will show you if they are still registered at the suggested address.

Grumpelstiltskin said:

There is always the free online site Family Search  Search Historical Records. This is run by the Mormon church but it is not a religious site.

The family tree in FamilySearch is a collaborative effort, so sometimes the errors people made in their personal trees get replicated.

The other problem with familysearch is that some years ago they ran an algorithm to attach baptisms belonging to the same parents together, creating "families." England, Wales and Scotland are a bit smaller than the US so their concept of close is problematic. Any unallocated children baptised to parents named Jack and Jill Smith within a time period and a geographic area, were bundled together into one family.

So I have three children born in the 1820s in West Yorkshire to known parents with a common surname and common forenames. Familysearch bundled them up with another 25 children born 1800ish to 1837 anywhere between Manchester and Tyneside.

Their real parent's marriage is on familysearch but disconnecting the baptismal records (multiple for each child) from the conglomerate family and attaching them to the right parents took hours. It was Covid, so I did the same of other identifiable groups of children, having checked the parents' marriages and the baptismal records, including separating the baker and shear-sharpener sharing a first name living in the same town. Had a similar problem with unrelated families ranging from Fife to East Lothian from 1770-1805.

But familysearch is great if you've got emigrants as they have records for some less usual countries. You can also access some overseas records using the Library edition of Ancestry for which you otherwise have to pay an additional subscription.

My small tip if you find an emigrant family on familysearch and they or their parents were resident in the UK in 1881 is that you add that census record to the emigrant's family tree in familysearch and to your own tree on Ancestry. A lot of US families in particular have no clue whereabouts their emigrant came from.