re: Has anyone used Ancestry.com?

quote:

---

Anyway, the consensus among the "hardcore tracers" is that ancestry.com is equivalent to how long john silver's is received over on the F&D board.
=======

They were totally off on my ancestors. But, it looked legit and I can see tons of people being fooled cause they want to know so bad, they just believe it as fact.

---

I spent 20 years searching thru paper documents and micro-fiche when I could spare a few hours to devote to it. A 'professional' may be able to make headway with that approach, but 99% of the time and effort you put into 'hard research' is just wasted.

HOWEVEr - when I first started, I was looking for my great grandfather Smith (whose name at the time I remembered as "william francis smith' - while thumbing thru the 'smith' section of the Louisiana Confederate Soldiers records in the local library, my eyes noticed a name "Francis Marion Leroy Smith" and I remember thinking to myself = "damn - I wish he had a name like that to go along with the 'smith' last name.' Later, in a census I was scrolling thru, I found a FML smith and the name clicked - turned out it was him and that opened up a whole line for me.

So paper research is doable, but it is hard and it is time-consuming.

Searching census records now is so easy that nobody can believe that it used to be a ball-buster.

as for the Long John Silver comment - you have to be a stupid lazy irresponsible researcher if you fall for bad lines in public ancestry trees. They are there but they are easy to ignore. All you have to do is find trees with credible sources and then check the sources themselves to see if they correspond to other already established 'true' data you have accumulated. If it doesn't match, you ignore it.

I started with nothing more than a few recollections from my father back in the late 70s and have hard documentary support for every person I have added to my tree since.

Without the built in search resources and the data compiled/linked by Ancestry, I'd still be back looking for a great grandparent - I'd have never come across records that reside in NC, AL, GA, MA, CN.