I don’t know if I’m just doing something wrong but I built my family tree and the website seems to have barely any information about my family at all. I found out more just checking out our national archives then what I found on this website. It’s maybe worth noting that I’m not in the US and it does appear to be somewhat US-centric.
The best it could find was a couple of enrollment records for voting and a single immigrant notification in an old newspaper. It didn’t find these either by itself, I had to manually go though the search system to find it. The OCR didn’t even get the spelling of the name correct.
I’m not sure what I expected but it was definitely better than this, especially for all the pay walls they throw up.
I use familysearch.org. It’s free! I’m not sure what country you’re in, but I’ve found a lot of info on European, Italian, and some African ancestors through there.
“It’s free!” Is alarming and inappropriately cheerful.
These sites are sociopathic data harvesters, and if your relatives have any sense they’ll give you shit for exposing them to it as well. If it’s free, it’s probably even worse.
It looks like this is sponsored by the Mormon Church. They haven’t spammed you have they?
Wow. my app cut off this comment so editing:
Nope! They send occasional emails when they find new records or a past relative’s birthday, but I have not received any spammy ones from the Mormons or asked to join their cult.
They own all of them. They have a large stake in Ancestry too. Also, the Mormon church has investment funds that own a ton of things. It was a big deal recently because they lied to the SEC to hide the size of it from their members.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ensign_Peak_Advisors
Would you give 10% of your income to someone who has $124 billion already?
Beyond this, they will use the data in their fucked up rituals to “Baptize the dead”. They will take your ancestors names, and retroactively baptize them into their church without consent from the deceased or family.
I thought if I put my name and my parents and grandparents in, it would help me build a tree. Then it was so who are your great grandparents? Bitch that’s why I’m here!?
Step 1: have an unrequited desire to be the center of attention
Step 2: emoji
Step 3: Don’t fucking care because I use an app that blocks that shit.
Check out Voyager if it bugs you so much.
Clearly, you aren’t a super white American. My family tree got filled up easily up until the 1600s because I have a bunch of family members with nothing better to do than catalog our family tree. Apparently one half of my family came from Scotland in the 16th century so I can claim that I’m Scottish-American now.
I think its so funny hearing people are American (whatever country their grandpappy came from) 😂
It’s because American doesn’t tell you anything about where your ancestry is from. You could be from anywhere in the world and be American. Scottish is a pretty specific things, as is just about any other nationality.
I still only say I’m American even though my family is largely from Scotland. WV Appalachian (I think Appalachian in general) has a large percentage of Scottish ancestry, and it also shares the same mountain range interestingly enough.
I’ve been paying $25 a month to run into relatives that all have their trees set to PRIVATE.
They’re my cousins / second-cousins, and I’m not sure who their parents are or how they fit into my tree.
The site lets you look at US Census data… from the 1950s or some shit. So I can piece together family information upwards half a dozen ways to my grandparents and their parents and so on, but I can’t seem to get any info from the system for anyone born after the 1950s.
I keep paying because I’m trying to solve a spooky family mystery.
I was a spooky family mystery. There are records out there, particularly for the US, but you have think laterally and use resources outside their walled garden. US census records are only released after (IIRC) 70 years, so getting the 1950 census was a pretty big development. Beyond that, there are obituaries, phone books, newspapers, yearbooks, and others. I can even say from experience that the creepy “Radaris” style sites are usually leveraging some kernels of valid information in the free teaser data they show.
its just another way they collect data and track people.
