My ancestry.com experience in a nutshell
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.
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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.
That spooky family mystery is exactly why their family trees are all set to private.
story time! :D
Their grandpa married a ghost. They're 1/4 ghost.
Scooby Doo & The Gang in: WHO KILLED MEEMAW?!
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.